Integration of engineering change objects in product data management databases to support engineering change analysis

This study proposes a product data management (PDM) database that can support engineering change analysis (ECA). It can integrate ECA with the existing main product development process managed by PDM systems. Since engineering change (EC) history is a key EC data element that enables ECA, this study extends PDM databases to represent the EC history with existing entities for ECs and associated products and their product structures. To show the feasibility of the proposed PDM database, this study integrates a prototype PDM system with on-line analytical processing (OLAP) tools and a data mining module for ECA. It also applies the implemented tools to two typical ECA applications, EC evaluation and EC propagation problems. The illustrative application examples show that the proposed PDM database can support ECA through multidimensional data analysis with OLAP and data mining with association rules.