A Model-Based Approach for Integrated Variation Management

Variation management is a responsible task for product developers, which have to balance the ever-increasing quality demands and cost pressures, while considering the product design as well as the manufacturing and assembly process. These aspects have a direct impact on its subsequent success in the market. Therefore, a large number of different activities of variation management are necessary. In this area, a wide variety of mostly document-centered methods support product developers, which have individual interfaces. Thus, it is currently not possible to map the entire variation management process in a single model. Especially with regard to the increasing availability of large amounts of data, the potential of an integrated variation management cannot be exploited efficiently. For this reason, this paper presents a novel model-based approach for the development of a combined system and tolerancing model. This model contains the processes and activities of integrated variation management and links them with further system models and the corresponding data. The presented approach is a superordinate model for variation management as well as its processes and provides the modeling of individual views of different stakeholders. In addition, process- and program-specific solutions can be integrated into the model, which enables a cross-linking of the data beyond their interfaces. In this paper, the approach is realized using the systems modeling language (SysML).