Multiple views to support engineering change management for complex products

Unforeseen change propagation can have a major impact on products and design processes and cause project delays and excessive costs. However, current change management depends heavily on individual designers' typically limited product overview. For complex products, this approach is error-prone because the amount of data that is necessary to properly assess the risk of changes is too large. The information has to be broken down into smaller chunks so that it is easier to cope with. On the other hand, an overview over the entire product must be provided in order to be able to predict changes resulting from changes in other components. In this paper we discuss the CPM (Change Prediction Method) tool that incorporates a multiple view strategy to visualise complex change data and allows designers to run what-if scenarios in order to assess the implications of changing components in a complex product during the design process.