A Hierarchical Product-Property Model To Support Product Classification and Manage Structural and Planning Data

GIMÉNEZ, DIEGO MARCELO; HENNING, GABRIELA; LEONE, HORACIO

Milán

Conferencia; ICEIS 2009 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems; 2009

INSTICC

Mass customization is one of the main challenges that managers face since it results in a proliferation of product data within the various organizational areas of an enterprise and across different enterprises. Effective solutions to this problem have resorted to generic bills of materials and to the grouping of product variants into product families to facilitate data analysis and exchange, as well as to share common information. However, issues like product family identification and formation have not been dealt with by this type of approaches. Moreover, they have not presented mechanisms to handle aggregated data pertaining to the identified generic concepts. This contribution addresses these challenges and proposes a hierarchical data model based on the concepts of variant, variant set and family to tackle them. It allows managing huge amounts of structural and non-structural information in a systematic way, with minimum replication. Besides, it proposes an unambiguous criterion, based on the properties of the variants, for making product classification as well as identifying families and variant sets. Finally, the approach can explicitly handle aggregated data which is intrinsic to generic concepts like families and variant sets. A case study is analyzed to illustrate the representation capabilities of this approach.