An information technology view of manufacturing automation - product life-cycle management

Different approaches of product life-cycle management will be demonstrated to show that unlike several engineering paradigms it is easy to understand, however difficult to implement and to follow. This can be accepted as a common philosophy of product development and production. At the same time product life-cycle management is a software framework, or a kind of guideline to approach digital manufacturing, which is the highest level of recently known and applied ways of manufacturing automation. The paper will show some components of manufacturing automation and their relation to the life-cycle view