Abstract

The globalization of the business world results in geographical dispersion of parties involved in design. One of the techniques proposed for providing early involvement of dispersed parties is utilizing Virtual Collaborative Design Environments for supporting conceptual and embodiment design. However, design is not restricted to development stage. A product's configuration goes through engineering changes for improving and refining design throughout the product's life-cycle. In this thesis, we focus on Engineering Change Management process and modeling this process within a Virtual Collaborative Design Environment. We propose an Active Distributed Virtual Change Environment named ADVICE for performing Engineering Change Management functions. This non-immersive environment offers a superior approach to the existing Engineering Change Management solutions by merging graphical and parametric data involved in the process into a virtual object, which improves comprehension of users and hence decreases the time required for review. ADVICE employs data mining techniques to process captured change history and provides user support with prioritization and change propagation mechanisms. The proposed environment is demonstrated through a sample application. For verifying the prioritization and change propagation mechanisms, experiments involving synthetic data are conducted. The experiments presented the capability of ADVICE to facilitate Engineering Change Management