A multi-views modeling approach for product lifecycle management in supply chain

Product lifecycle data is considered valuable resource to improve quality of product designing. However, at present, under the environment of E-manufacturing, product data is scattered across different companies during product lifecycle. Because enterprise information systems are heterogeneous, it becomes a challenging task managing product lifecycle data through the complete supply chain. In this paper, firstly, the product lifecycle management process is analyzed from the viewpoint of supply chain. Then, a data model is proposed to represent business activities related to product data generating. In the data model, all business activities are discomposed to three elements which are target, work flow and resource. All product data is composited by these three kinds of elements. Furthermore, in order to integrate heterogeneous data across supply chain, ontology is used to represent the proposed data model. Because that the ontology is abstracted from different companies in supply chain, multi-views modeling method is adopted to construct ontology collaboratively. Finally, based on the data model of ontology, a prototype of product lifecycle management is designed and implemented in the application of a manufacturing company. The case study shows that the ontology-based data model could support the integration of heterogeneous data during product lifecycle flexibly.