Engineering Change Management: A novel approach for dependency identification and change propagation for product redesign

Concepts of change propagation analysis in engineering design

“…Where it is desired to present an array of propagation information with respect to each element or connection, lists or tables are oftenIf the change does propagate, its impact on appropriate. Examples of CPA output information visualised using lists include: Change cost (Ahmadinejad and Afshar 2014;Zheng et al 2017;Ren et al 2022); manufacturing impacts (Tseng et al 2008); probability of change (Lee and Hong 2018); characteristics of change (Kattner et al 2017); quality (Mckay et al 2003); parameter convergence (Fan et al 2004); magnitude of influence on assembly tooling (Yin et al 2016); constraints violated or at risk of violation (Ollinger and Stahovich 2004); parameters changed (Rouibah and Caskey 2003;Masmoudi et al 2017b); propagation paths (Masmoudi et al 2017a); risk assessments (Conrad et al 2007;Koh et al 2018); and impact magnitude (Chen et al 2017). Fei et al (2011) present a tabulated result interface which contains details such as the cause and effect of change, involved components, and suggested changes.…”

“…Dependencies among design parameters are said to be one of the key issues in engineering change management (Masmoudi et al 2017b), for example, because those dependencies establish relationships between components (Tang et al 2016). Change propagates among parameters that are derived from one another by calculation, or that are linked by constraints (Xie and Ma 2016).…”

“…Early in the design process, before detailed part features have been created, changes to datum geometry such as axes, planes, and envelopes in skeleton models can also cause propagation (Hwang et al 2009). Apart from mating, other constraints such as parallelism and concentricity can cause geometric change to propagate (Masmoudi et al 2017b, a). Geometry is closely related to design information in many other domains discussed in this section, leading to further propagation possibilities (Ma et al 2008).…”

Characteristics of changeable systems across value chains

“…The dependencies between product components are assessed by the methods with the lowest granularity (Clarkson et al, 2004;Koh et al, 2013;Keller et al, 2005;Ullah et al, 2017;Ou-Yang and Cheng, 2003;Lee and Hong, 2015;Ullah et al, 2018;Koh, 2017). Methods with a higher granularity decompose the product into different layers (structure, behaviour, function) (Hamraz and Clarkson, 2015), into product parameters (Masmoudi et al, 2017;Yin et al, 2017) and into degrees of freedom (Schuh et al, 2017). Consequently, the dependencies within a product are described from different levels of detail.…”

“…Assessment of change propagation helps in evaluating the dependencies within a system and quantifying the impact of changes (Masmoudi et al, 2017;Giffin et al, 2009). This information forms the basis for systematic decisionmaking in CM, which is crucial to design, engineer and transform manufacturing .…”