Engineering Change Process Modeling and Control for PLM

The paper presents a method of change process control and change information integration based on process modeling and workflow technology. A change process can be divided into several change activities, and each activity is described by change activity task, operated information, organization, resources and so on. A complete change process model is composed of all the related change activity models. A change process model is initialized and applied to real process with the aid of the workflow mechanism, which also helps to drive different sub-change processes to work together, synchronize information, maintain data by authority rules, as well as assure proper information access and modification, so as to control and manage the change process. The change information is then released in a new data version, thus data correctness, inheritance and traceability can be protected. In this paper, a change information description method is proposed, and the change information could be shared and integrated via an open database. At the end of this paper, the implementation is provided in a product data management (PDM) system. Authors: L. Qiao, Y. Zhang (Beihang University)