PLM services, a new OMG standard to push “collaborative engineering” ICE 2005

Through the build up of partner alliances "value networks" in the automotive industry, engineering will become a big change in the coming years. Partner overlapping engineering teams have to be organized, common data and processes have to be managed, an integration of a heterogeneous system landscape across the networked companies has to be supported. The one system strategy forced in the last years from a lot of OEMs will not work any more. This requires building up a Collaborative Engineering Environment across company and system borders along the whole product life cycle. IT is important to do this in a standardized way. The OMG PLM Services provide the first definition of an international standard that is able to establish a basis for integrating and managing this heterogeneous partner overlapping system landscape on a standardized way. Based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach, it defines services for the management of product structure and documents including positioning information for geometric models, for classification and description of configuration and change management and for process planning. Thus, PLM Services enable real collaboration within worldwide distributed engineering based on Web Services.