A conceptual structure and issues for an object-oriented bill of materials (BOM) data model

Abstract

One of the most promising concepts in the development of the next generalization of data models is the object-oriented approach. This paper describes a conceptual data model that integrates elements of semantic relationships with object orientation concepts to develop a model for a Bill of Materials (BOM). The semantic relationships include Referencing, Owns and Composed-Of, as well as their reversed relationships Referenced-By, Owned-By, and Part-Of; the object orientation concepts contain features of object-oriented programming such as data abstraction and inheritance. A BOM system is one of major inputs to the planning and control of manufactured products. A product has many part sub-assemblies, which have further subassemblies, and so on. Raw material is represented by “leaves” of the BOM system. A structure of BOM can be regarded as an abstraction hierarchy of an object-oriented data model, and from this point of view, the proposed conceptual BOM data model, named OOBOM, can be mapped onto the abstraction and the inheritance architectures of an object-oriented data model, and implemented in C++ language. An application of the OOBOM system is demonstrated for a sample product.