A Unified Model for Product Data Management and Software Configuration Management

Software configuration management (SCM) is the discipline of managing the evolution of a software system. Product data management (PDM) is the discipline of controlling the evolution of a product design. These two domains have been evolving independently and fairly disconnected. Nowadays, the development of modern products involves a substantial and growing part of software development. However, due to the limitations of approaches taken by both domains, efforts to build a unified configuration management (CM) model of SCM and PDM have had limited success. This paper presents a novel unified CM model and its associated CM infrastructure/tools that are configurable and tailorable to support any engineering area. Key contributions include a novel methodology, a unified CM model, and associated tools that allow for the automatic generation of CM code for supporting both hardware designs and software artifacts in multidisciplinary engineering areas