Efficient Multi-view Change Management in Agile Production Systems Engineering

Abstract

Agile Production Systems Engineering (PSE) is a complex, collaborative, and knowledge-intensive process. PSE requires expert knowledge from various disciplines and the integration of discipline-specific perspectives and workflows. This integration is a major challenge due to fragmented views on the production system with a difficult a priori coordination of changes. Hence, proper tracking and management of changes to heterogeneous engineering artifacts across disciplines is key for successful collaboration in such environments. This paper explores effective and efficient multi-view change management for PSE. Therefore, we elicit requirements for multi-view change management. We design the agile Multi-view Change Management (MvCM) workflow by adapting the well-established Git Workflow with pull requests with a multi-view coordination artifact to improve over traditional document-based change management in PSE. We design an information system architecture to automate MvCM workflow steps. We evaluate the MvCM workflow in the context of a welding robot work cell for car parts, using a typical set of changes. The findings indicate that the MvCM workflow is feasible, effective, and efficient for changes of production asset properties in agile PSE.