ADVICE: A virtual environment for Engineering Change Management

In this paper, we analyze Engineering Changes (EC), which are modifications in forms, fits, functions, materials, or dimensions in components constituting the design. We propose a new approach for processing these changes within a Virtual Collaborative Design Environment. This environment, named Active Distributed Virtual Change Environment (ADVICE) offers an Engineering Change Management solution by merging graphical and parametric data involved in the process into a virtual platform, which improves the comprehension of users and hence decreases the time required for review. ADVICE provides smart user support for predicting Engineering Changes to be triggered due to a specific change and for offering priorities to Engineering Change Requests. This is managed by employing Sequential Pattern Mining techniques to process captured Engineering Change history with Prioritization and Change Propagation mechanisms. For verifying these mechanisms, experiments involving synthetic data are conducted. The experiments present the capability of ADVICE to facilitate Engineering Change Management.