A Rule-driven Generator for Variant Parts and Variant Bills of Material

The adaptation of the range of products within an enterprise to the today's customers' demands results in an exploding number of different variant parts and variant bills of material. If frequent updates of such a great number of variant parts are necessary, the maintenance of the corresponding data with conventional methods and software systems is often made to expensive or sometimes even impossible. Therefore, in this paper a rule-driven generator for variant parts and variant bills of material is introduced, which extends conventional relational database systems with rules and operations for the dynamic generation of variant parts and variant bills of material. As a consequence, this dynamic generation dramatically reduces the number of product data. With this approach an efficient management of variant parts is provided and redundancy and inconsistency are prevented.