Fundamental concepts of product/technology/process informational integration for process modelling and process planning

The aim of this paper is to summarize the main basic concepts for data integration during a product's life cycle. This integration is necessary in order to favour a more efficient communication between collaborators from inside or outside the company, in a distributed design or e-design context. The information is based on models that structure the concepts and allow their re-use due to the memorization of design history. The current evolutions extend the prospective fields of this approach both to earlier stages ( functional aspects, etc) and to later stages ( logistics, recycling, etc). There remain, in a global vision of the enterprise, many prospective fields that should allow the total traceability of products during their life cycle.