Matching Bills of Materials Using Tree Reconciliation

A product Bill of Materials (BOM) is a structured tree which represents its components and their hierarchal relationships. The BOMs are traditionally used for Material Requirement Planning (MRP). However, they do have other useful applications in product modeling and variety management. Recent research used graph difference operations, linear algebra and integer programming to match trees of BOM and find pairwise similarity measures for applications such as clustering product variants into families and retrieval of design and manufacturing data. Matching phylogenetic trees has been utilized in biological science for decades and is referred to as “tree reconciliation”. A new application of this approach in manufacturing to match pairs of BOM trees and retrieve the most similar design is presented. This novel method can help speeding-up other downstream planning activities such as process planning, hence, improving productivity and shortening time to market. Assembly of chemical processing centrifugal pumps is used as a case study for demonstration. This novel matching of Bills of Materials uses linear time algorithms, compared to state-of- the-art algorithms which use integer programming and matrix approximation, hence, leading to more computational efficiency.