Design and logistics IT federation through Product Lifecycle Support standard

Wide diffusion of methodologies and software relevant to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) in industrial companies faces heterogeneity of IT systems. Especially, the lack of interoperability between Product Data Management (PDM) systems, that drive virtual product development, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which manages real product, cannot lead to a coherent description of the product development process. We show that a “mediator” approach is pertinent for the coordination of these two systems. The use of open standards, and more precisely STEP Application Protocol 239, known as Product Lifecycle Support (PLCS), allow overcoming issues related to semantic part of this interoperability. The last part of the paper focuses on preliminary works in order to develop a product model, coherent according to the design or production viewpoints, for a specialization of generic PLCS data model and a future implementation.