Obstacles and development of support for translation of configuration rules

Collaborative product development is a method for reducing costs, but there is a risk of severe obstacles during the product documentation exchange. Product documentation for configurable products describes how parts can be combined with so-called ‘configuration rules’. This paper is based on a case study of the configuration rule exchange in a collaboration project between two automotive firms. The research approach was to create information and process models for the configuration rule exchange, and then to discuss obstacles and improvements. The results showed that the main obstacles were the difference in authoring methods, causing difficulties in detecting changes as well as a time-consuming reformulation of configuration rules. An implemented algorithm addressing the change detection serves its purpose to demonstrate the effort required to overcome this obstacle during a configuration rule exchange. The identified obstacles, and the effort to overcome them, are crucial to understand in order to motivate and direct further research of improved configuration rule exchange support