Multiple Abstraction Levels in Modelling Product Structures

摘要

The need for product customization is driving industrial companies towards a verylarge product variety, which affects many functions of a company, including the after-sales. An abstracted view to the population of delivered products is required to keep systematic maintenance records of very different product individuals. However, the older the product individual, the less systematically recorded information there usually is about it. The authors defined a novel mechanism based on genetic models of product individuals organized into a specialization hierarchy to support multiple abstraction levels. For creating such hierarchies, the authors defined a set of transformation operations on models.