Introduction

During a product's lifecycle, many bills of materials (BoMs) may be created to describe it. Each is a distinct way of seeing that product and may fulfil a different purpose: for example, for design, maintenance and shipping of a product. All BoMs must be consistent with each other and each represents a different configuration of the product.

Differences between the configuration of BoMs may arise in a number of ways, such as through operations like adding or removing parts or combining multiple parts into a sub-assembly - which we refer to here as "transformations" - or indirectly if designers use more than one design system so that discrepancies arise.

In the latter case, it may be necessary to re-establish links between common items across multiple BoMs to ensure they are consistent with each other. We refer to this process as "reconciliation" and it is performed automatically in the software prototype, StrEmbed. Some real-world scenarios in which BoM transformation and reconciliation may occur are described below and include demonstrations of how these operations can be performed with StrEmbed.

The design scenarios

This section links to three engineering design scenarios, driven from selected design configuration challenges, that illustrate the potential value of the DCS project research for the engineering design community. Each scenario is presented using the following viewpoints of RM-ODP (Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing).

• Enterprise viewpoint: describes the engineering design process requirements and potential benefits for design practitioners in the scenario.

• Information viewpoint: describes the kind of information used in the enterprise viewpoint (including a case study used to demonstrate the scenario).

• Computer support viewpoints: brings together three software support viewpoints (Computational, Engineering & Technology) to illustrate how StrEmbed, the design software developed through the project, meets the requirements of the enterprise viewpoint. The computational tools and software engineering methods used for each scenario are described, as is the technology developed to address each scenario in the form of software.

The scenarios use two pieces of software (both written in Python) that were developed as part of the DCS project:

(1) StrEmbed is a software prototype for BoM configuration, transformation and reconciliation, available from Github here: https://github.com/paddy-r/StrEmbed-6-1, with the following persistent DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6806818. StrEmbed also uses PartFind, which is described below.

(2) PartFind is a trained machine-learning tool for finding the degree of similarity between the shapes of CAD objects and identifying their primary manufacturing process, available at Github here: https://github.com/thazlehurst/partfind; also see the Machine Learning section of this website for more details.