Conceptual modeling and generator framework for multidisciplinary and collaborative product lifecycle management

Engineering enterprises today have to cope with various challenges dealing with the management of their multidisciplinary and collaborative engineering contexts. Amongst others, those are: the integration of involved distributed IT systems, the management of changes on the complex collaborative product and process data, and the support of collaborative users. Many solutions have been proposed and implemented in today product data and workflow management systems. However, they are often restricted to only a specific engineering discipline or were not conceived for collaborative and multidisciplinary issues. Further, the diversity and heterogeneity of the models used to implement them and the lack of a semantic model supporting their consolidation constitute a barrier to an efficient collaborative product lifecycle management. We propose to leverage existing product and process modeling approaches and standards in order to develop a holistic semantic meta-model enabling the modeling of artifacts for collaborative and multidisciplinary product lifecycle management (PLM). The provision of generators and predefined services to enable the operative deployment of the models designed using that meta-model contributes to the reduction of the overall costs for implementing collaborative PLM solutions and facilitate its dissemination in small and medium sized enterprises. This paper presents a concept for such a framework based on the concept of engineering networks.