Integration of bill of materials with unified bill of materials model for commercial aircraft design to manufacturing

The commercial aircraft enterprise faces a major challenge in product data management as it deals with increasing product complexity and global manufacturing. As such, the effective bill of materials management throughout the product lifecycle is becoming much more important for the advanced competitiveness. This study proposed a unified bill of materials model based on single source of product data for commercial aircrafts. This study illustrated the details of the unified bill of materials model throughout the product lifecycle and presented the technology to support the integration of engineering bill of materials and manufacturing bill of materials with unified bill of materials model. A prototype system was implemented to verify the developed technology by taking into account real cases of a local commercial aircraft enterprise. It proved that the developed technology could substantially improve industrial competitive advantage.