CONTROLLING PRODUCT RELATED ENGINEERING CHANGES IN THE AIRCRAFT INDUSTRY

The management of engineering changes at the development stage of a product life cycle is a key issue in the aircraft industry. Changes at the design stage can have some terrible consequences on both the product and the organization so they must be kept under control. In this paper, we first make a review of the key publications in the engineering change control domain and we try to highlight actors’ needs as well as the improvements that could be brought into this process. In the second part, we propose a solution for an efficient control of the engineering change process. This solution is based on a product model that contains all the information required during the process as well as the components connections that can propagate changes within a system. These models enable the creation of a cooperative environment dedicated to the actors involved in the process. Within this environment, actors can access pertinent information quickly, share their results and access some methods to investigate the impacts of a change and to assess the solution they have developed. Furthermore, for this process to be efficient a set of treatment strategies has been defined according to the different kinds of requests.