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

Abstract

During their life cycle, products can be re-designed due to the requested changes. One or more changes can be applied to the products in order to improve, upgrade and adapt it to new requirements. These changes can have serious impacts. For one design change, some impacts can be predictable while others occur due to unexpected propagations on other parts of the product. Dealing with this risk, companies look for an approach to evaluate and model the propagation of changes impacts to minimize their consequences. The main objective of this work is to characterise this change impact by identification of the dependencies among product components, which is a first and necessary step to evaluate change propagation. We develop a novel approach based on Design Structure Matrix and graphs to identify and characterise the type of dependency existent between product parameters and compute the change propagation impacts. Our findings show that functional dependency is more detailed than quantitative and qualitative dependency characterisation, already used in the literature. A case of 2D geometric model of bicycle is presented at the end of paper.