Traceability and management of dispersed product knowledge during design and manufacturing

Engineering product development in today's industry is becoming increasingly knowledge-intensive and collaborative. As the people, departments, and partners involved in product development tend to be geographically dispersed, there are increasing demands to globally cooperate during the design phase and outsource the manufacturing processes (Li and Qiu, 2006). Due to this geographical and institutional separation between the different systems involved in the product lifecycle, querying and sharing product knowledge is becoming a key issue in the information systems of extended enterprises. In order to avoid lengthy product development cycles, collaboration across distributed and multidisciplinary design teams has become a necessity. Today's knowledge-intensive product development environment requires a framework which effectively enables capture, representation, retrieval and reuse of product knowledge. This is the essence of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) (Ameri and Dutta, 2005). Moreover, although each process and operation in the product development cycle is able to state information that can be useful for decision making, a holistic view of the product is missing. By holistic view we mean the conceptualisation of what knowledge should be carried within the product. Product specific views used locally for each process, operation or application might be conflicting, redundant or inconsistent; the constitution of a holistic view of the product should improve the product lifecycle management. The concept of PLM is aimed at moving beyond engineering aspects of a product and providing a shared platform for the creation, organization and dissemination of product related information across the extended enterprise. It extends Product Data Management (PDM) functionalities to include the creation of product information as well as management and control of such information. Currently, the lack of explicit semantics and contexts in the information content to be shared across PLM applications is a major problem (Gerritsen et al. 2008). Making data semantics explicit, context aware and sharable among product life cycle applications is a major challenge. For an adaptable organization to function, a product knowledge representation that supports well defined information and knowledge exchange processes among the participants is critical. Indeed, one of the common problems in facilitating an exchange of product knowledge to support collaborative product development is that the actors involved do not have adequate guidance on what kind of knowledge elements should be shared, and how the communication should be structured. Traceability, defined as the ability to describe and follow the life of conceptual or physical artifact, addresses these challenges by providing semantic and …