The Role of Standards in Product Lifecycle Management Support

A major challenge of any product engineering project is to support the creation, exchange, management and archival of information about product, process, people and services across the networked and extended enterprise covering the entire product lifecycle spectrum. An information support system for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) requires a move from product data exchange to product information and knowledge exchange across different disciplines and domains. PLM support systems will need to have both syntactic and semantic interoperability of computer systems and people through well defined standards. We begin this paper with a model of communication between two agents and then extend this model to describe the information flows in PLM so as to serve as the basis for understanding the role of standards for PLM support systems. Support of PLM requires a set of complementary and interoperable standards that cover the various aspects of PLM. We identify an initial typology of standards relevant to PLM support. The typology primarily addresses the hierarchy of existing and evolving standards and their usage. The typology identifies a suite of complementary standards supporting the exchange of product, process, operations and supply chain information. Given the nature of the task of developing and deploying a set of standards for PLM support systems, we argue that open standards with wide participation are the key to their realization.