A method for the expert-based identification of engineering change propagation

Handling engineering changes effectively becomes more and more important for the performance of the overall design process. Therefore, it is crucial to assess the propagation of engineering changes precisely to prevent unexpected workload. However, the detailed analysis of technical systems to predict possible change propagation is often time consuming. Furthermore, the effort needed for the analysis highly increases with a growing number of system elements. Hence, methods for the application in the industry have to be both precise in the prediction of change propagation and extremely time efficient. This paper therefore presents a new approach to identify change propagation by combining a matrix-based approach of modeling interrelations with the implicit available knowledge of an expert familiar with the system. Additionally, the system understanding is expanded by introducing artefacts. It remedies the problem of having preliminary development results, e.g. feature specification or preliminary part lists, which also have to be considered in the change propagation analysis. Finally, the approach is evaluated within an industrial use case.