Multiple abstraction levels in modelling product structures

摘要

The need for product customisation is driving industrial companies towards a very large product variety, which affects many functions of a company, including the after-sales. Systematic maintenance records of very different product individuals cannot be kept without an abstract view to the population of delivered products. However, the older the product individual, the less systematically recorded information there usually is about it. We defined a novel mechanism based on generic models of product individuals organised into a specialisation hierarchy to support multiple abstraction levels. For creating such hierarchies, we defined a set of transformation operations on models.