Managing Product Evolution in Agile Manufacturing Environments

This paper presents an integrated object-oriented database approach for managing the evolution of products in agile manufacturing environments, Schema evolution modification facilities are provided to support full potential versioning of type definitions. All of the possible versions for a composite product are not explicitly represented to avoid version proliferation. However, valid configurations of any composite products can be provided to comply with customer demands, The attributes of composite products are classified in order to provide well-defined representation scheme for composite products and to be exploited in version control. The attributes are partitioned into composite-related and non composite-related categories. Composite-related attributes consist of subproducts and description ones. Subproducts attributes represent physical constituents of a composite product. Description attributes represent external features, assembling, and correspondence property. Interface attributes are introduced for managing configurability and version propagation. Version derivations due to the changes to the interface attributes are propagated toward the product composition hierarchy, The validity of configurations of composite products is checked by using configurability maps. Instance objects which represent the actual product instances are stored and manipulated in the database in order to support traceability during product life cycle.