Managing diagrammatic models with different perspectives on product information

In the context of engineering-oriented companies, a basic distinction can be made between the information needed during sales, engineering and manufacturing. When representing such information in diagrammatic models, these models will most often include both individual and shared content. For instance, during the sales phase, information about sales prices may be relevant, while this information is not relevant in the engineering and manufacturing phases, where, on the other hand, more detailed information about components and assembly is needed. However, such information models often share basic component definitions. Having this overlapping information across models means that when maintaining these, redundant work has to be carried out for the overlapping parts of the information. This, obviously, can be both time-consuming and a significant source of errors. In this paper, a modelling method for the management of diagrammatic models with different perspectives on product information is proposed. The aim of this method is to avoid redundant information across models, in order to reduce time needed for ensuring of consistency across models and minimize the chances of errors. The need for information models with different perspectives on the same product information is common in cases that involve design/redesign of complex products and/or the construction of product configurators. Besides a knowledge representation technique, the paper suggests two different solutions for software support, of which the application of one of these in an actual project is described.