An XML-based Representation for Generic Bill of Materials (GBOM)

The conventional approach for describing bill of material (BOM) as a tabular structure implemented within a relational database system makes it difficult for the generic bills of material (GBOM) in a customer-oriented production, where the number of variants may go into high numbers. This research presents a novel XML-based approach to represent generic bill of material (GBOM), entities that represent and maintain one generic structure that encompasses all variants of a product. This approach combines a produce-oriented notation and gives further a high degree of flexibility to support the user in the product variant specification task. The generic BOM system is then introduced for the particular product variant, and a prototype system has been developed. Finally, conclusion and future works are discussed.