Understanding allocations

During the development process, a product evolves through various revisions of the product structure and its components. It also evolves through various representations. For example, during system analysis and engineering, you express the representation of the product in terms of a set of requirements the product must satisfy and a set of functions it is expected to perform. As the product design matures, you may identify other representations, including the logical structure, the assembly structure and the manufacturing structure. All these representations are related and a change to one representation may necessitate changes to other representations. For example, a change to one of the product requirements may cause the product to perform an additional function. A new physical component is added to perform this function and, in turn, a new manufacturing process is needed to assemble this component into the product. You can capture, locate, and manage these dependencies between representations with allocations.