Heuristics for change prediction

Effective change management is a key to successful design development. As products and parts of products change, others can be affected, leading to further - often unexpected and costly - changes. These knock-on effects can jeopardise the timely delivery of projects and carry therefore a great risk for the entire design process. Predicting change propagation is difficult as designers do not have the overview and hidden dependencies between components are overlooked. This paper introduces simple graph theoretical heuristics as a means to predict knock-on changes. The heuristics are validated on the basis of the existing change prediction method and real world product models.