Engineering Change Impact Analysis in Production Using VR

The market conditions that manufacturing companies are currently exposed to, leads to high demands in terms of flexibility in production and thus to a high number of engineering changes in production. In this paper, an approach will be presented to support engineering change processes, to identify the change impact within production and to process multiple engineering changes simultaneously. Therefore, the elements of production systems as well as their attributes and relations will be represented by using UML. These are used in VR to identify potential impact on other elements when changing an element. After this, a change impact matrix is deduced and a similarity analysis between changes is conducted. The measure of similarity will be used to combine multiple engineering changes to engineering change projects.