Management of Associations within Digital Mock-Ups for Improved Collaboration

In the current collaborative and extended-enterprise environment, product definition must be exchanged between original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and other partners who contribute to the evolution of product definition. In many cases, an information package, which is associated with other objects in the DMU, must thus be extracted from the OEM’s Digital Mock -up (DMU) and be sent to partners and suppliers to allow them to perform the required work on their work packages (WP). The objective of our research is to maintain the associations between objects when a work package is removed from the DMU of the originator, modified by the subcontractor, and then reinserted into the DMU. We propose an association management model to transpose the initial work package associations towards the modified work package, to reconcile these associations with the DMU and then propagate changes towards the latter to maintain consistency.