An XML-based approach to represent generic bill of materials

To solve the difficulty in describing the generic bill of material (GBOM) with the conventional tabular structure in a relational database system, a novel XML-based approach is presented to represent GBOM. It can represent and maintain one generic structure that encompasses all variants of a product. With the combination of product-oriented notation, this approach further gives a high degree of flexibility to support the user in the product variant specification task. The generic BOM system is then introduced for the particular product variant, and a prototype system has been developed. It is indicated that the presented approach is feasible.