DESCRIBING PRODUCTS AS EXECUTABLE PROGRAMS - VARIANT SPECIFICATION INA CUSTOMER-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENT

In a customer-oriented environment standardized models are replaced by generic products. A generic product is defined through a set of attri butes, which may have a set of alternative values. Since the number of variants may run into high numbers, it is impossible to design and ma intain a bill of material (BOM) structure for each variant. A solution is to describe all product variants in one generic BOM. BOMs for each product variant may then be generated from this structure by specifyi ng attributes. By describing the generic BOM as an executable computer program we get the flexibility needed to integrate different aspects of a product in one structure. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All righ ts reserved.