Managing virtual factory artifacts in the extended PLM context

Virtual engineering increases the rate of and diversity of models being created; hence requires maintenance in a product lifecycle management (PLM) system. This also induces the need to understand their creation contexts, known as historical or provenance information, to reuse the models in other engineering projects. PLM systems are specifically designed to manage product-and production-related data. However, they are less capable of handling the knowledge about the contexts of the models without an appropriate extension. Therefore, this research proposes an extension to PLM systems by designing a new information model to contain virtual models, their related data and knowledge generated from them through various engineering activities so that they can be effectively used to manage historical information related to all these virtual factory artifacts. Such an information model is designed to support a new Virtual Engineering ontology for capturing and representing virtual models and engineering activities, tightly integrated with an extended provenance model based on the W7 model. In addition, this paper presents how an application prototype, called Manage-Links, has been implemented with these extended PLM concepts and then used in several virtual manufacturing activities in an automotive company.

Automated summary

Virtual engineering requires maintenance in a PLM system to manage the increasing rate and diversity of models being created. This research proposes an extension to PLM systems by designing a new information model to effectively manage historical information related to virtual models and engineering activities.