Concepts and an Implementation for Product Data Management

Shorter product life-cycles, growing product complexity and the need for a large number of product variants have made Product Data Management (PDM) increasingly important for many manufacturing companies. This thesis provides a survey of the most important concepts of PDM technology and illustrates the concepts by describing the design and implementation of an advanced document management system. The survey in the first part of the thesis illustrates the relations between different concepts and can be used as a framework for evaluating PDM systems. This part includes summaries of the STEP standards for product models and the IEC 6130 and ISO 13584 standards for component management. The STEP standards are particularly difficult to read, and these sections of the thesis provide accessible introductions to these very complex standards. The document management system described in the second part of the thesis has been developed in close co-operation with a large manufacturing company, which now stores all engineering documents in the system and accesses the system through a global intranet. The main strengths of the system are its versatile document model and the flexible customisation properties of the system, including dynamic schema manipulation operations and a programmable authorisation mechanism. One particular topic in the thesis is product configuration. The first part introduces a framework for configurable products in terms of an explicit structure and constraints. The second part discusses different ways to add product family structures to the implemented system. © All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the author.