Introduction

This capability describes how to represent a product breakdown structure..

A breakdown is a partitioning of a product into a set of related elements to support engineering, analysis and other activities that may be performed in relation to the product. These breakdowns are explicit, parent-child views that comprise the product elements.

EXAMPLE

A system breakdown and a functional breakdown may be created in early design phases, and refined in later phases.
A physical breakdown (possibly identifying locations for individual product items) may be created for logistics support analysis, and used in the support and maintenance of the product.
A functional breakdown may be used to organize operational user documentation for the product.

These views are complementary to the assembly structure and bill of materials views that are the primary focus for manufacturing (realization) of a product (see C002: representing_parts and C003: representing_assembly_structure). Breakdowns may be of designs or realized individual products. For any product, more than one breakdown may exist to support various different engineering activities.

This capability also supports the requirement to identify the product or relationship between products that is the realization of a Breakdown_element_definition or a Breakdown_element_usage . A Breakdown_element_realization provides this identification.

EXAMPLE A breakdown of a bicycle may include a "front head light", which could be realized by a number of different headlights from different manufacturers. A number of Breakdown_element_realization could be used to identify all valid headlights from different manufacturers.