An integrated product development platform based on STEP and PDM

In today´s highly competitive global economic environment, integration plays an important role in enterprise strategy, and its benefits are enormous. The conventional integration technologies have limitations for supporting information exchange and sharing in various stages of product development process. This has led to issues such as data format incompatibility, one-way and static integration. This paper proposes an integrated platform developed based on the STandard for the Exchange of Product data (STEP) and Product Data Management (PDM) to overcome these issues. The goal of the research is to provide an open and extensible infrastructure for dynamical and bidirectional product data exchange and sharing. A multi-layer reconfigurable architecture for the integrated platform is proposed. One of the key issues about process modeling is discussed, which is solved by a proposed workflow modeling method. A prototype version of the platform has been developed and demonstrated with case studies.