Graph Model Based Bill of Material Structure for Coupling Product Development and Production Planning

Currently, a common way of collaboration between product development and production planning is working with a Bill of Material (BOM) in terms of Concurrent Engineering, which is characterized by a structure as a traditional relational data model. Even though such a BOM can serve as a single point of truth of the product structure, it still leads to information discontinuities from upper- to downstream engineering teams, as they use BOM data for different purposes. Hence, a restructuring work of the product development oriented BOM is needed for tasks in production planning, so that the hierarchy is adapted. The parts structure needs to be rearranged to meet the requirements of the manufacturing and assembly processes. In the circumstances of volatile global market and varying customer needs, the BOM structured in relational data model provides insufficient digital consistency to reach an appropriate time-to-market and quick response on product changes and variations. In order to be able to cope with the increasing amounts of heterogeneous data, graph data model approaches are playing an essential role. Due to its non-centric information representation, it can be used as a neutral data model to dissolve boundaries in engineering. A graph model based BOM structure can fulfill both tasks in product development and production planning directly. Thus, it can reach an optimized consistency concerning information flow through various engineering activities as well. This paper proposes the graph model based BOM to minimize efforts and gaps in collaboration between product development and production planning. In addition, it also shows further potentials of usage in engineering.