7. A product data management (PDM) system comprising: at least one processor; and an accessible memory, the PDM system configured to: store a hierarchical product data structure by a product data management (PDM) system, the hierarchical product data structure including a plurality of occurrence nodes and component nodes, the component nodes including a cell index value for a corresponding product component that identifies the product component's spatial location according to defined cells of a three-dimensional model of the product assembly; receive a query that references an occurrence node and at least one cell index value; determine a query result corresponding to the query, the query result identifying at least one occurrence node that corresponds to the cell index value; form a query result chain corresponding to the query result, the query result chain filtered by a structural criterion, apply a configuration rule to the filtered query result chain to identify child nodes of the filtered query result chain that conform to the configuration rule, and thereby producing a configured spatial retrieval result, wherein the configuration rule is only applied to occurrence nodes and occurrence chains that have already satisfied spatial constraints; and store the configured spatial retrieval result.
8. The PDM system of claim 7 , wherein the PDM system receives performs a lookup process on an occurrence equivalency table and anchor occurrence table, and determines the query result that identifies occurrence chains corresponding to the query.