Developing quality indices for the management of product structure data across product life cycles

A computational tool has been developed to highlight inconsistencies between design descriptions. This tool links these differences to a set of quality indices based on three types of inconsistencies between bills-of-materials based on the type, number and shape of parts. The indices are algorithmically calculated by parsing and analyzing computer-aided design models available as STEP AP214 files. They have been evaluated for a case study of a two-robots based welding system. The results indicate that the algorithm works well for products of varying granularities in the BoM descriptions and can support engineers in the efficient management of product structure data.