Multiple abstraction levels in modelling product structures

The need for product customisation is driving industrial companies towards a very large product variety, which a€ects many functions of a company, including the after-sales. Systematic maintenance records of very di€erent product individuals cannot be kept without an abstract view to the population of delivered products. However, the older the product individual, the less systematically recorded information there usually is about it. We de®ned a novel mechanism based on generic models of product individuals organised into a specialisation hierarchy to support multiple abstraction levels. For creating such hierarchies, we de®ned a set of transformation operations on models. Ó 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.