Technical products are composed of many interconnected parts that work together to realise the products’ functions. Change made to one part of a product tends to affect other parts and propagate. For example, a change made to the geometry of one component may require the geometries of adjacent components to be changed. In turn, these changes may require yet more components to be changed.
There is a substantial body of evidence demonstrating that most product designs are not wholly new. Instead, they are modifications and changes to existing designs. Understanding the full implications of changes, in terms of how a change to a single component can propagate beyond that component throughout the system, remains a problem for industry.
CPM (Change Prediction Method) is a DSM-based numerical approach for predicting and analysing how changes are likely to propagate through a system. The system is decomposed into its components and the dependencies between them are captured. Likelihood and impact values represent the strength of the linkages with regard to propagation of engineering changes. A stochastic algorithm is applied to calculate the combined risk of change propagation between components considering multiple steps of direct and indirect change propagation. Different diagrams (i.e. Change Propagation Tree, In/Out Risk Portfolio, etc.) can be generated to support the analysis.