Maintaining consistency across design descriptions in engineering product development

The success of engineering product development depends on the effective communication of design descriptions in formats that suit the needs and capabilities of all stakeholders involved in the delivery to market and through-life support of products. Configuration management is a core design process to ensure the consistency of the technical data package, i.e., the collection of design descriptions needed to support the development, manufacture and operation of a given product. Bills of Materials (BoMs) are critical parts of the technical data package because they act as integrators: adapting detailed design descriptions to suit the needs of particular downstream processes. The ability to reconfigure BoMs while maintaining internal consistency of the technical data package (where all BoM configurations are complete and compatible with each other) is a major challenge. In this paper, we introduce research exploring computational tools that could support engineers in manipulating BoMs while also maintaining the internal consistency of the technical data package.