Estimating the effects of Engineering Changes in early stage product development

Constantly changing requirements pose a major challenge for industry, especially in the early phases of product development where there is little information available. One of the main reasons for that are the effects of change propagation. Several tools and methods address how Engineering Changes affect further product components, however how these changes affect the project cost and time has not been sufficiently addressed so far. We propose a method that aims to estimate the additional effort and impact on project time of implementing a change, providing an additional decision support whether or at what cost to implement a requirement or an engineering change.