Reducing the uncertainty in engineering change management using historical data and simulation modelling: A process twin concept

Engineering change management (ECM) makes up a large portion of overall product development effort and provokes significant uncertainty in planning and executing the product development operations. By enabling better planned ECMs, practitioners can improve overall project management. This work introduces the concept of the digital twin for the ECM process to enable its continuous quantitative assessment and improvement of engineering process planning. For this, we bring forward two key contributions: the concept of the framework for ECM process simulation and analysis, and the approach to refine the ECM modelling parameters using historical data and thus reduce associated uncertainty. This work proposes that by using past information, we can improve the accuracy of ECM modelling and enable more precise predictions on process lead time and its standard deviation. We conclude the article with an outlook for further research pointing at the current limitations and challenges.