The Boeing Company
PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE LINE CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM USING GRAPH DATA STRUCTURE

Abstract:

A product life cycle management system for use in manufacturing a customizable manufactured article using one of a plurality of manufacturing line configurations is described. A graph data structure is stored in memory, including a plurality of connected nodes including one or more applicability group nodes for applicability groups representing the manufacturing line configurations and object nodes for objects representing components used in the line configurations, the object nodes being connected to the one or more corresponding applicability group nodes to thereby encode in the graph data structure the manufacturing line configurations with which each object is related. A manufacturing-related query from a user is performed on the graph data structure, and one or more object-applicability group relationships are determined based on the manufacturing-related query.