Possibilities for intelligent automation in product definition

During the past decade, engineering moved into virtual spaces in the leading industries and product model became a medium between communicating engineers. This change motivated the authors of this paper to make a development on currently prevailing product representations where human intent, engineering objective are not included in product models. Lack of this decision background information makes understanding and evaluation of earlier decisions difficult at application of product model. There are questions those can not be answered using product model. At the same time, there is a definite tendency to develop product model into the only product information carrier. As a possible solution, the authors proposed an extension to the currently applied product modeling in the form of information content modeling. The objective is recording a background description for decisions on objects in product model. In this paper, first the proposed extension is explained considering the contextual nature of product definition. Following this, preliminaries and related research are discussed. Next, the extended model is introduced as a set of contextual content spaces. Finally, some words are devoted for the possibilities of implementation of the proposed method in professional product lifecycle management (PLM) systems.