METHODS OF CHANGE IMPACT ANALYSIS FOR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

During product development, the customer or internal stakeholders initiate changes concerning the components or functions of a cyber-physical system (CPS). The complexity of such a CPS causes difficulties in evaluating the effects of a component change. Accordingly, product developers need an assistance system to quantify the impact of a component change on hardware, software, system functions, and production processes. Therefore, this paper focuses on concepts to evaluate the effects of component, functional, and process changes and contributes to its clarification and further understanding of the importance and requirements for such an assistance system. The literature review assesses the identified methods regarding their objectives, application objects, level of automation, and relations characteristics. However, the literature review pointed out that the change prediction method from Clarkson et al. (2004) is well-established in the literature and able to quantify the impact of a change