Using engineering change forecast to prioritise component modularisation

Abstract

This paper presents a method that uses engineering change forecast to identify and prioritise product components for modularisation. The method uses a matrix-based technique to map change requirements to affected product components and later converts the said matrix into a component dependency matrix referred to in this work as the Engineering Change Forecast (ECF) matrix. The risk of change for each component is subsequently computed based on the ECF matrix to prioritise components for modularisation. The method was applied to support modularisation efforts pertaining to the design of a truck at a multinational engineering firm based in Germany. Six hundred and forty-three change requirements were considered in this work. As a comparison study, an analysis was made at the component level and repeated at the sub-component level. It was found that out of the top ten sub-components that were ranked with high modularisation priority, nine are sub-components of the top three components prioritised for modularisation when the analysis was done at the component level. This suggests that the method can produce consistent results over different levels of modelling granularity.