An ObjectBased and AttributeOriented Method for Deciding the Effect in Product Development Lifecycle Change is inevitable during product development lifecycle. When changes occur, all the affected items must be handled in order to maintain the consistency and integrity of the product. Thus, Engineering change (EC) has been a nonnegligible issue for enterprises. We propose an objectbased and attributeoriented concept in this paper. Specifically, this paper objectifies a structure of a variant product design and characterizes the product design through items, attributes and linkages, and further defines the detail of the linkages. When changes occur during product design period, we also propose an objectoriented and recursive mechanism in deciding the effect of changes initiatively. An example is presented to verify the proposed concept and mechanism of the change impact analysis (CIA) approach.

Defining Effort Indicators to Retrospectively Assess Engineering Change Information The engineering change management becomes increasingly important in modern product development. Since the amount of changes, the complexity as well as the cost of engineering changes increases due to the complexity of technical systems, an efficient handling of changes is crucial. Hence, a systematic approach to investigate the engineering change management regarding the effort distribution within the technical system allows to increase transparency for optimizing the change handling. This paper therefore introduces effort indicators to investigate a technical system regarding its proneness to change effort. Hence, it defines indicators which enable an assessment of engineering change effort. Furthermore, it describes an approach to calculate the indicators based on past engineering change data by using network analysis.