parent-child relationship

A parent-child relationship is a hierarchical link between records, objects, or entities where one higher-level item, the parent, is associated with one or more subordinate items, the children. It is commonly used to model structure, ownership, containment, or execution order in manufacturing data and industrial software systems.

In manufacturing systems, parent-child relationships appear in bills of materials, routings, work orders, quality records, equipment hierarchies, and traceability models. For example, an assembly may be the parent of multiple component parts, a production order may be the parent of several operations, or a batch may be the parent of related sub-batches or inspection results.

The term usually describes a data or process hierarchy, not a human relationship. It should not be confused with a dependency in every case. A child record may depend on the parent for context, but dependency logic, sequencing, and approval rules are separate design choices that vary by system.