INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN, ICED11 15 - 18 AUGUST 2011, TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF DENMARK INFORMATION MODELS USED TO MANAGE ENGINEERING CHANGE: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE 2005-2010 Naveed Ahmad, David C. Wynn and P. John Clarkson Engineering Design Centre, University of Cambridge ABSTRACT Engineering change is a significant part of any product development programme. Changes can arise at many points throughout the product life-cycle, resulting in rework which can ripple through different stages of the design process. Managing change processes is thus a critical aspect of any design project, especially in complex design. Through a literature review, this paper shows the diversity of information models used by different change management methods proposed in the literature. A classification framework for organising these change management approaches is presented. Finally, the paper argues the benefits of multiple domain-models to help manage changes. Keywords: Engineering change, change management, literature review 1 INTRODUCTION One of the earliest and most often cited formal reviews on engineering change was published by Wright (1997). He reviewed literature between 1980 and 1985 and found very few papers on the topic. Since then, there has been a significant increase in the number of publications on engineering change. This can be seen in one of the latest reviews on change management by Jarratt et al., (2010). These two papers provide general reviews on change management, broadly covering every aspect of the topic and also categorising literature. Other review papers focus on a particular aspect related to change management. Rouibah and Caskey (2003) reviewed supply chain issues in change management. Huang (1998) thoroughly reviewed approaches for electronically-managing engineering changes. Browning and Ramasesh (2007) conducted a survey of activity-based network models, where they pointed out lack of consideration of the structure of the detailed design process in methods to manage changes. In addition to papers studying theory and proposing methods to support change management, others report on case studies conducted to understand the nature of change and identify the problems associated with managing changes. For instance Eckert et al., (2005) conducted an interview-based case study and reported findings regarding the predictability of engineering change in complex design . In another case study, Giffin et al., (2007) studied past change data and used this to draw conclusions regarding the nature of the change propagation in complex systems. Case studies of change management give new directions and insights into problems faced by designers in industry, and are a source of motivation for researcher as well. This paper presents the results of a detailed systematic search of the literature on change management published between 2005 and 2010. The paper adds to the existing reviews, for example Wright (1997) or Jarratt et al., (2010), in that it classifies the change management approaches based on the forms of information models which are proposed to analyse changes. This highlights the diversity of information models used by change management methods proposed in the last five years. 2 DEFINITIONS Some of the key terminology used throughout the paper is defined as follows: • Function: We use Pahl and Beitz’ (1995) definition of function as “an abstract formulation of the task in terms of inputs and outputs, independent of any particular solution”. • Component: A product can be divided into a number of components/subsystems. Each component should participate in carrying out at least one function. • Design parameter: An input or output to a design task, which may (for instance) describe some ICED11 1