Design for Product Lifecycle Management

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is a concept that aims at integrating the various processes and stages involved during a typical product lifecycle for the extended enterprise. PLM technologies endeavor to offer a powerful collaborative platform to support distributed product development. In order to maintain the integrity of product definition data throughout the life of the product, and to manage business processes used to create, manage, disseminate, share and use the information, this paper first explores the connotations of PLM; then presents a conceptual modeling framework including a four-tier-architecture; furthermore models product lifecycle in the stages of requirement analysis, conceptual design, engineering design, manufacturing and services; and finally proposes an integration framework to support interoperability of distributed product data sources