Using allocations between multiple sources and targets

An allocation represents a directional relationship between a specific instance of an item revision in one product structure and one or more item revisions in another structure. For example, you might relate lines in the functional structure to the logical structure or the logical structure to lines in the physical structure. These relationships may span multiple configurations and revisions of both structures. They may change according to the overall configurations or the specific revisions that are configured into the structures.

A group of allocations that map together two or more structures is referred to as an allocation map or allocation context. An allocation map is a Teamcenter object that can be revised separately from the structures that it maps. However, depending on your business rules, you may want to revise the allocation map at the same time as you revise the associated structures. When you revise an allocation map, you create an allocation map revision in the same way that revising an item creates an item revision. Depending on your business logic, the allocations in the allocation map may be carried forward or dropped from the new allocation map revision; this behavior is determined by preference settings.

You can use allocations to map multiple sources to multiple targets in more than one structure, if the combinations are valid according to your business rules. For example, allocation A1 can map two sources (P2/A and P3/A) to three targets (F2/A, F3/A, and F4/A).

You create allocations that map several views or representations of the same structure. For example, you may create three allocation maps that map the requirements, functional and assembly views of a product, as follows:

• Req-Funct-Map/A between the requirements view and the functional view.
• Req-Assm-Map/A between the requirements view and the assembly view.
• Funct-AssmMap/A between the functional view and the assembly view.

Note that you can only work with a maximum of two open structures at any given time. Consequently, you must create these three allocation maps one at a time.

Each of these allocation maps may also be revised independently of the others. The requirements view may be managed in Teamcenter systems engineering and requirements management, while the other views are managed in core Teamcenter.

If you apply configuration rules independently to the source and target structures, you may cause inconsistencies between components configured in the two views. You can apply the same configuration criteria to the source structure, target structure and the allocations mapped between them. To achieve this, you can create a collaboration context and the corresponding configuration context in the Multi-Structure Manager application. When you place your structures and allocation map in the collaboration context, the specified configuration context configures everything in the collaboration context identically unless you manually override it.

Allocations have a direction, that is, each allocation has a source and a target, for example, Function 4 is allocated to ECU 1. An allocation whose source is occurrence A and whose target is occurrence B is not the same as an allocation whose source is occurrence B and whose target is occurrence A.

You can make a where allocated check on a selected occurrence to view its relationships in multiple representations. Teamcenter shows the occurrences mapped to the selected occurrence as sources or targets, depending on whether you chose an allocated from or an allocated to check.

You can optionally implement user exits to determine the allocations between structures are complete and correct according to your company's business rules. For details of how to implement user exits with allocations, see the Integration Toolkit.