Content Orientation in Integrated Product Modeling

Changes in engineering for development of product in the direction of increased complexity, more variants, and customer demand orientation stimulates implementation of advanced information technology in the form of virtual space. For this reason, concept of integrated product model has been implemented in comprehensive descriptions for lifecycle management of product information. Communication between engineer and modeling procedure is a critical factor. The authors identified data orientation of the recent integrated product modeling as a barrier for more efficient communication on user interfaces of product modeling systems. As a possible contribution to development of solution for this problem in industrial professional modeling systems, they propose content oriented layers between human and data oriented models in this paper. Following this, integration issues in content oriented product model are discussed. Next, relevant functions and modeling techniques for the handling of modeled object information are introduced and evaluated. Finally, a method is shown for the propagation of changes initiated for modeled objects in their affect zones.