A SysML profile supporting change orders in model driven engineering

One important capability for manufacturing enterprises is the ability to manage change orders, which are changes after the customer has placed the order. The change can be due to several reasons, such as misunderstanding of requirements or the inability of the supply chain to deliver parts, materials or subassemblies at an acceptable cost and lead time. The effective management of the latter kind of change requires linking design model elements to parts, which can be obtained from the supply chain or made in-house. In this paper, SysML is extended to support the said linkage, and based on these extensions a workflow is defined for handling the change. The model repository that underpins model driven engineering is exploited to partially automate the workflow and to relieve the change engineer from the need to understand the product structure or SysML.