An Object-Based and Attribute-Oriented Method for Deciding the Effect in Product Development Lifecycle

Change is inevitable during product development lifecycle. When changes occur, all the affected items must be handled in order to maintain the consistency and integrity of the product. Thus, Engineering change (EC) has been a non-negligible issue for enterprises. We propose an object-based and attribute-oriented concept in this paper. Specifically, this paper objectifies a structure of a variant product design and characterizes the product design through items, attributes and linkages, and further defines the detail of the linkages. When changes occur during product design period, we also propose an object-oriented and recursive mechanism in deciding the effect of changes initiatively. An example is presented to verify the proposed concept and mechanism of the change impact analysis (CIA) approach.