Harnessing complementary product and process models to support change processes in product lifecycle activities for extended PLM solutions

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HARNESSING COMPLEMENTARY DATA STRUCTURES TO SUPPORT CHANGE PROCESSES IN PRODUCT LIFECYCLE ACTIVITIES FOR EXTENDED PLM SOLUTIONSThe capacity of a company to innovate is directly related to its capacity to efficiently manage product evolutions or changes. Changes throughout the life of a complex product generate retroactive flows of information, which are most important for effective collaboration. These are still not well understood from a scientific point of view and are currently only supported by empirical practices and methodologies. This research proposal aims at discovering complementary data structures to formally support retroactive processes induced by product change across product lifecycle activities such as design, manufacturing and in service. The originality of this research lies in the study of complementary product data structures such as features, bill of materials, tolerances, process plans and manufacturing dispersions to effectively manage multidirectional flows of information within a PLM system. In simple terms, PLM is about integrating the various data management software developed for the different stages of the life of a product (CAD, CAM, PDM, FEA, Workflow management, etc.) in a comprehensive package destined to improve the information and data share between partners, clients and suppliers in a digital enterprise environment. The main hypothesis to be validated in this research work is that only complementary, rather than unified, data structures can effectively support multidirectional flows of information in the product lifecycle and thus advanced PLM solutions.