A Procedure for Building Product Models in Intelligent Agent-based OperationsManagement

This article presents a procedure for building product models to support the specification processes dealing with sales, design of product variants and production preparation. The procedure includes, as the first phase, an analysis and redesign of the business processes that are to be supported by product models.

The next phase includes an analysis of the product assortment, and the set up of a so-called product master. Finally the product model is designed and implemented by using object oriented modelling. The procedure is developed in order to ensure that the product models constructed are fit for the business processes they support, and properly structured and documented in order to facilitate the maintenance and further development of the systems.

The research has been carried out at the Centre for Industrialisation of Engineering, Department of Manufacturing Engineering, Technical University of Denmark.