Research on the Hierarchical Template Technique forAutomated Generation of Engineering BOM

Most of the engineering institutes have their own formats of BOM and some items in BOM contain nested sub-forms. These make the automatic generation of BOM much more difficult. On the basis of statistics, we summarized some common rules for most of the BOM structure. First of all, BOM is hierarchical. So the hierarchical-template-approach is proposed. Hierarchical-templates are used to describe the data source, filling rules, sorting rules, form composing rules, form structure, paging rules and page layout for BOM. Users can customize their own BOM-template to meet their own engineering needs. Since the nested sub-form has been into consideration, the hierarchical-template-approach suffices to process complex BOM formats. This approach has been successfully applied in plant steelwork design system of PDSOFT SteelWorks.