A Design Versioning Scheme Supporting Management of Design Change Propagations

A design change made on a design object does not necessarily make the new design replace the old one immediately: they should co-exist in a logically centralized PDM (product data management) system until the design change is fully propagated upwards and downwards throughout its entire affected scope and all the resulting new versions have been accepted as better alternatives on the whole. Design change propagation among interdependent design objects should be well-managed compounding on the plain versioning management mechanisms within conventional PDM systems. This paper discusses a deeper understanding to the semantics of interdependence relationships between sub-processes, each of which corresponds to a task-specific private information model (design object). A comprehensive set of design change propagation properties are then identified. A new versioning scheme is further proposed which explicitly incorporates these properties and can extend ordinary PDM and WM (workflow management) functions for especially supporting management of design change propagations. The model has been tested in an integrated engineering environment for the progressive die design and manufacturing process.