An Object-Oriented Framework for Bills of Materials in Process Industries

VEGETTI, MARCELA; HENNING, GABRIELA; LEONE, HORACIO

Computer Aided Chemical Engineering-10

Elsevier Science Ltd.

Año: 2002; p. 991 - 996

Products that were formerly quite standard turn now into custom-made ones, leading to an enormous increase in product variants. High degrees of redundancy can occur in data management when closely related product structures are treated as independent bills of materials. Since the bill of materials (BOM) is one of the most fundamental data in industrial enterprises a lot of work has been devoted to it in last years. In this contribution, a new object-oriented BOM has been proposed. It easily manages crucial aspects that should be taken into account in a product representation, such as the efficient handling of product families and variants concepts, composition and decomposition structures and the possibility of describing restrictions. Moreover, the model easily accommodates the needs of various organizational units within a company.