A heuristic to generate a precedence graph between components for a product family

The authors present a pragmatic approach to structure a product family into several independent sub-assemblies and to generate its precedence graph. These tasks are performed on a unique product model, based on a liaison diagram formalism. This formalism has been extended to deal with product families, offering a valid solution for all the variants of the family, also called product variants. Through a relevant description of the physical links between components, it is possible to propose a methodology that considerably reduces the amount of input data. This approach has been applied to several industrial case studies, among which isa family of car alternators, presented in this paper