Product Structure Modeling

Product structure is a hierarchical decomposition of a product, typically known as the bill of materials (BOM). As business becomes more responsive to unique consumer tastes and derivative products grow to meet the unique configurations, BOM management can become unmanageable.

Advanced modeling techniques are necessary to cope with configurable products where changing a small part of a product can have multiple impacts on other product structure models. Concepts within this entry are all caps locked in order to indicate these concepts.

Several concepts are related to the subject of product structure modeling. All these concepts are discussed in this section. These concepts are divided into two main aspects. First the product breakdown is discussed which involves all the physical aspects of a product. Second, different views at the product structure are indicated.

Figure 1 illustrates the concepts that are important to the structure of a product. This is a meta-data model, which can be used for modeling the instances in a specific case of product structuring.