Static Product Structures: An Industrial Standard on the Wane

Abstract

This paper aims at closing the gap between early phases (e.g. design) and later phases (e.g. procurement or production) of the Product Development Process (PDP) by proposing a Virtual Product Model (VPM) as a collection of individual components (VPMCs) without the need for a static structure. Based on an analysis of the requirements on product development in the automotive industry, the main problems we observe are limited transparency, limited continuity, and limited reusability throughout different phases of the PDP. Virtual Product Model Components (VPMCs) can be used in different products and allow the reflection of changes throughout the PDP as well as the derivation of domain-specific views on the overall product at runtime. We illustrate these concepts by use case scenarios derived from an analysis of automotive product development practices.

Challenges and Architectural Approaches for Automotive PLM in Multi-Brand Organisations - A Discussion Paper

“…We conclude this subsection by means of three exemplary observations which we have been encountering throughout our research and practical work in multi-brand OEM environments over the past years (Kehl et al, 2015(Kehl et al, , 2016. In the following we describe observed approaches taken to deal with the challenges we identified in Section 2.1 and 2.2.…”

“…This operationally driven software development often means that no central IT strategy is pursued and therefore different systems are often poorly or not at all coordinated. Especially in multi-brand OEM environments, the absence of such strategies leads to a sprawling diversification regarding highly specialized and domain-specific systems (Kehl et al, 2016). From an overall perspective, each of the systems contains some of the data needed for the complete description of the products being manufactured.…”

Towards Automated Classification of Product Data Based on Machine Learning

“…The most common way to store product data in practice is in tree-like component structures such as BOMs (Adolphy et al, 2015;Kehl et al, 2016). Children of a node within such structures often give information about a further decomposition of the node into smaller units, e.g., car  front-end  drivetrain  engines.…”

“…These filters are similar to the userspecific views described in this paper. Another concept for such views is proposed in (Kehl et al, 2016), who derive views based on previously classified product data. They are the first who propose deriving user-specific views from products by using classes.…”

“… The similarity-based retrieval of components (e.g. spare parts) based on similar or identical characteristics of different components,  the mapping of one product structure to another, and  the related derivation of user-specific views according to (Kehl et al, 2016). Note that classification requirements may vary from one product to another or at different placement locations within a product.…”