Distinction of domain-specific and cross-domain linkage types for engineering change management

Abstract

Engineering Changes (ECs) are substantial elements of the design process of technical products and are in particular relevant for companies due to enormous additional costs and time delays they can cause. In order to better understand ECs and realize efficient Engineering Change Management (ECM), different approaches exist. One aspect of ECM are change propagation analysis, which try to analyze knock-on effects of an EC on other product elements or the development process. How ECs can propagate is in particular difficult to assess for complex products realized within different engineering domains (mechanical, electrical and software engineering). To address this challenge, ECs are classified, strategies to cope with ECs are presented and change propagation approaches are analyzed in this paper. Thereby a lack of indicators for cross-domain propagation is identified. To overcome this issue, the distinction of domain-specific and cross-domain linkage types is proposed and a set of linkage types is presented. Further research is motivated to integrate these linkage types in product models while also considering processes and organizational structures as additional dimensions of ECM.