An object-oriented model for complex bills of materials in process industries

Abstract

-In recent years, many process industries have been forced to drastically increase their product variety and adopt mass customization production strategies. Many of them have found that traditional bill of material (BOM) processing systems do not sufficiently support the maintenance of the very large amounts of data (concerned with product structure) demanded by these new production policies. Due to the use of BOM technology within the framework of integrated information systems, there is a demand for both (i) a new representation of BOMs, able to deal efficiently with product variants and to handle decomposition-based production strategies, and (ii) its corresponding BOM information processing system. This paper describes a conceptual representation that integrates elements of semantic relationships with object-oriented concepts to develop a data model for a hybrid bill of materials. The proposed semantic relationships include composed-of, decomposed-into, variant-of, restriction-of, and their corresponding reverse relationships. The conceptual model has been implemented using object-oriented data-based management system (OODBMS) technology that allows creation of persistent Java objects. Preliminary tests show a remarkable reduction in the number of relationships when compared with former approaches.