Support for effective change management in product data management systems

One of the actual issues in organization and optimization of collaborative design activities is development of way that allows to control and to evaluate the consequences of changes in the design environment. In this paper a methodology called GAM-DIFF is presented. GAM-DIFF uses the exciting design models and specific algorithms to extract and to represent the modification realized by each expert. The differences are presented in difference model which contain a semantic to describe the modified, added and deleted elements or relationships within two design models. The GAM-DIFF has been evaluated using an example of product design to demonstrate the change consequences in collaborative design situation.