The Role of Product Data Management in the Manufacturing Engineering ToolKit

A Manufacturing Engineering ToolKit (METK) is under development at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The toolkit consists of commercial-offthe-shelf (COTS) manufacturing engineering software applications. The purpose of the toolkit is to provide an integrated framework, operating environment, common databases, and interface standards for those applications. Currently, manufacturing software applications provide computer-aided support for most of the engineering activities required to plan the processes needed to make parts. The data generated in each of these activities must be captured and archived. Since most of the data is in the form of computer data files, a configuration management functionality is needed to capture/maintain the data files and make the files available to the various engineering applications. A Product Data Management (PDM) application provides this functionality. PDM applications allow the capture, archival, and recovery of data files with revision and version control. This paper describes how a PDM application is being used in the Manufacturing Engineering ToolKit.