In variant design, the proliferation of bills of materials makes it difficult for designers to find previous designs that would aid in completing a new design task. This research presents a novel, data mining approach to forming generic bills of materials (GBOMs), entities that represent the different variants in a product family and facilitate the search for similar designs and configuration of new variants. The technical difficulties include: i) developing families or categories for products, assemblies, and component parts; ii) generalizing purchased parts and quantifying their similarity; iii) performing tree union; and iv) establishing design constraints. These challenges are met through data mining methods such as text and tree mining, a new tree union procedure, and embodying the GBOM and design constraints in constrained XML. The paper concludes with a case study, using data from a manufacturer of nurse call devices, and identifies a new research direction for data mining motivated by the domains of engineering design and information.
Forming generic bills of material (GBOMs) that represent the different variants in a product family can be used to facilitate the search for similar previous designs and the configurations of new variants REF .
A Data Mining Approach to Forming Generic Bills of Materials in Support of Variant Design Activities
Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering
Engineering