A Data Mining Approach to Forming Generic Bills of Materials in Support of Variant Design Activities
Open Access
- 1 December 2004
- journal article
- Published by ASME International in Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering
- Vol. 4 (4), 316-328
- https://doi.org/10.1115/1.1812556
Abstract
In variant design, the proliferation of bills of materials makes it difficult for designers to find previous designs that would aid in completing a new design task. This research presents a novel, data mining approach to forming generic bills of materials (GBOMs), entities that represent the different variants in a product family and facilitate the search for similar designs and configuration of new variants. The technical difficulties include: (i) developing families or categories for products, assemblies, and component parts; (ii) generalizing purchased parts and quantifying their similarity; (iii) performing tree union; and (iv) establishing design constraints. These challenges are met through data mining methods such as text and tree mining, a new tree union procedure, and embodying the GBOM and design constraints in constrained XML. The paper concludes with a case study, using data from a manufacturer of nurse call devices, and identifies a new research direction for data mining motivated by the domains of engineering design and information.Keywords
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