Abstract: The relationship between product design structure matrix, adjacency matrix, and reachable matrix is analyzed. Then, based on an interpretative structural model, a method is proposed to predict engineering change propagation. By this method, the reachable matrix is divided into a number of areas in a hierarchical way such that a multi-level hierarchical graph of changing tasks is established. In this way, the propagation scope and impact relation is clearly revealed. Further, fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is used to evaluate the impact degree between changing tasks. The propagation scope and impact degree between some assembly changing tasks of one particular aircraft model are analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method.

Key words: engineering change, product design, fuzzy AHP, impact degree analysis