Study on Endless Loop Node Checking Algorithm for BOM

A phenomenon of endless loop node often appears in BOM management, which is that one of the child components of a part contains the part itself in the assembly relationship and can result in endless loop of BOM traversal while working out Material Requirements Planning. Because of the high complexity of BOM and the slow computation speed of the algorithm based on the depth-first or breadth-first search technique to check endless loop nodes, a node compressing algorithm is presented to solve the problem. The analysis of computing complexity and illustrative example indicate that the algorithm is efficient and feasible.