Data Integration in a PLM Perspective for Mechanical Products

One of today’s hottest topics in information technology is integration. In this paper, we deal with the problem of data integration in a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) vision. That is, how to integrate product data throughout the entire product lifecycle, ranging from conception, through design, to manufacture, operation and destruction. This paper presents three approaches studied in the context of mechanical products to show how the problem of integration is dealt with. The study is mainly based on some examples of activities (or phases) taken from the product development lifecycle. Including the entire set of activities is out of the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, the three proposed approaches; meta-data, features, and ontologies show enough flexibility and potential to be generalized quite easily to other phases.