Patent ID: 7209869

Claim:
A method, for manufacturing an article of manufacture having a plurality of structural design variants in accordance with at least one order specifying particular design options, the article of manufacture being described in a bill of materials BOM containing a plurality of position variant definitions, each position variant definition being assigned to a particular position corresponding to a physical location in the article of manufacture, each position variant definition further identifying a specific part and including a code rule indicating when the identified part should be used at the location corresponding to the particular position, each code rule being a logical statement including one or more unique code rule elements; the method comprising the steps of: extracting unique code rules from the BOM; evaluating each unique code rule in accordance with the design options for each order; mapping the evaluations of the unique code rules to the corresponding code rules in the position variant definitions in the BOM; determining the appropriate position variant for each position in accordance with the mapped code rule evaluations; and manufacturing the article of manufacture based on the determined position variants for the respective particular positions corresponding to the respective physical locations in the article of manufacture, wherein: each code rule comprises at least one code rule element corresponding to a selectable design option; and the orders are contained in an order matrix which cross references each order against every code rule element, wherein each position variant definition has an associated validity period and the step of extracting unique code rules comprises extracting unique code rules only from those position variant definitions which have not expired at a specified start time based on the validity period, wherein a sequence of orders in the order matrix indicates a time sequence of manufacture, the method further comprising the steps of determining, in accordance with the specified start time, a build time when the article of manufacture associated with each particular order will be manufactured; and the step of mapping comprising mapping the evaluations of the unique code rules to the corresponding code rules in the position variant definitions only for those particular orders which have a build time within the validity period of the respective position variant.