Well-controlled engineering change propagation via a dynamic inter-feature association map

Currently, engineering companies face the challenge of delivering complex engineering project in a compressed time frame, which warrants concurrent and collaborative engineering. Due to the tedious dependencies embedded in collaborative domains, engineering change propagation is commonly a challenge and the procedure is carried out by engineers manually without systematic consistency check. Design change impacts are difficult to predict. To address the above challenge, an explicit and comprehensive engineering constraint modeling method is investigated according to a feature-based engineering scheme. To represent the network of constraints, a dynamically generated feature parameter association map is developed to analyze the associations among those parameters. Then, a dynamic mechanism of identifying the locally admissible value ranges of those related constraint parameters has been proposed in order to quickly accept design changes or to identify potential design conflicts. This mechanism then determines the admissible domain for the variable arrays in the formulated constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). Consequently, a well-controlled and progressively expanded change propagation method is proposed. This progressively expanded CSP solving approach is dynamic and incremental based on the association map. This proposed method is demonstrated to be effective to assist engineers with a typical intelligent change propagation solution.