New adaptive capability for generic product representation

Very complex and flexible information structure of product representation is essential requirement to cope with firm demands for increased engineering capability and shortened innovation cycle in leading industrial practice. In order to achieve the awaited product model, improved abstraction, behavior, and active knowledge representations constitute the current trend in product lifecycle management (PLM). The Laboratory of Intelligent Engineering Systems (LIES) at the Óbuda University joined to efforts to improve self-adaptive PLM modeling ten years ago. In this paper, the request, behavior, action, and context (RBAC) structure is introduced as one of the latest results at LIES. The purpose of the RBAC structure is to collect and manage actual content for generation of elements in the requirement, functional, logical, and physical (RFLP) structure. RFLP structure was recently implemented in leading PLM systems in order to establish multidisciplinary product modeling on the demanded higher abstraction levels. This is development of PLM systems towards systems engineering (SE). This paper introduces a previously published multilevel abstraction based product definition method, its application at the development of RBAC structure, connection of RFLP and RBAC structures, and modeling methods on levels of the RBAC structure.