Towards Modeling the Evolution of Product Families

Abstract

A strategy successfully used by manufacturing companies is to develop product families so as to offer a variety of products with reduced development costs. This paper introduces our initial research on the representation of the evolution of product families and of the rationale of the changes involved. The information model representing product families is an extension of the NIST Core Product Model and consists of three submodels: Product Family, Family Evolution, and Evolution Rationale. In addition, a Unified Modeling Language (UML)-based representation and a prototype implementation of the conceptual model are introduced.