Concept and implementation path for model-based impact analysis in product development

Engineers must evaluate the effects of changes in requirements during product design. Due to strongly linked design, production, and operation networks, these effects have tremendous consequences in cross-company engineering change and configuration management. Implications for development effort, the degree of fulfillment of requirements, functional costs, and follow-up costs in product variants and each system lifecycle stage (e.g., production, validation, and maintenance) must be assessed. Today, this is done without sufficient ICT (information and communication technology) support. In the German research project ImPaKT, reliable answers are to be inferred as to how technical and organizational changes to a partial model affect a complex, interdisciplinary overall system in an ICT-supported way. Therefore, a reference architecture is created using a Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach and a common parameter space. Adapted by corporate networks with their heterogeneous product and application lifecycle management (PLM/ALM) landscapes, homogeneous MBSE networks are created. The ImPaKT technology alliance is convergently developing existing ICT base technologies to enable engineering change management, linking isolated solutions and creating standards for handling changes to develop products faster and cost-efficiently and reduce risks.