A PROCEDURE-ORIENTED GENERIC BILL OF MATERIALS

Bill of Materials (BOM) structures describe the component structure of a product, most often as a tabular structure implemented within a rel ational database system. The conventional approach is to design a uniq ue BOM for each model or variant of a product. This becomes impossible with a customer-oriented production, where the number of variants may go into high numbers. The solution is to describe and maintain one ge neric structure that encompasses all variants of a product. This struc ture may then be used to generate a BOM for each particular variant. E arlier attempts to develop a generic BOM system have been directed tow ards improving the conventional tabular structures. These efforts have several limitations, mainly because the tabular structure does not of fer the flexibility needed to describe generic structures. We propose a generic structure based on a programming language notation. This not ation makes it possible to describe the set of possible variants of a product by handling both functional and structural relations between c omponents. The user can explode (execute) any part of the BOM to defin e a specific product variant. User specifications are given dynamicall y, as the generic BOM is executed. The system will then automatically generate a specific BOM for this particular product variant. A prototy pe system has been developed. Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd