Engineering Change Risk Assessment: Quantitative and qualitative change characterization

Abstract

Currently, computer-aided design (CAD) systems are very important for the design of any engineering products. CAD systems have undergone enormous progress. They are becoming more and more intelligent and automated. However, those systems still need improvement and still have flaws that need to be corrected in order to improve and develop the productivity and efficiency of the design process. Mechanical products are often complex and composed of multiple components so, consequently, an Engineering Change (EC) that affects a module or a single component will certainly influence the rest of the assembly. This phenomenon is called Change Propagation (CP). Therefore, in order to propagate a change that affects an assembly component easily, it is important to predict the Change Propagation Path and the impact of this modification on the rest of the assembly components. Hence, CP becomes an easy task. This paper focuses on the risk assessment of an engineering change, in order to enhance the predictive capacity of engineering change management methods. In fact, a full analysis must be made to measure the real impact of such modifications as well as their feasibility. To this end, the authors proposed a matrix-based approach, which results in a Risk Matrix. This is the product of the Relationships Matrix and the Influences Matrix which are constructed based on the data extracted at an early stage. In fact, the CAD assembly model contains a lot of important information that is extracted using Application Programming Interface (API).