This collection of papers constitutes the proceedings of the International Conference on Product Life Cycle Management (PLM'05) held at the Lumière University in the city of Lyon, France during the 11-13th July 2005. The first in this conference series was held in Bangalore, India in 2003, as an International Symposium. The success of this symposium and the large growing interest in the PLM field, led us to run the PLM'05 as an international conference. The objective of this conference series is to bring together researchers and practitioners involved in product innovation, product development and product delivery together in one forum to share their viewpoints on new product innovation, lifecycle management, and supply chain.

PLM as an area for research is still seeking an identity and a community. PLM holds the promise of seamlessly integrating and making available all of the information produced throughout all stages of a product's life cycle to everyone in an organization, along with key suppliers and customers. An important issue is the closing of the loop with feedback from the later stages of the product lifecycle to the early stages of the product concept and development. This book represents the current status of research in many of the issues that need to be understood and resolved to enable this integration.

PLM'05 program committee and reviewers from around the world reviewed a large numbers of research papers submitted and selected the most relevant papers. The papers presented in the conference cover a broad spectrum of topics from information models for PLM, collaboration, PLM framework and architecture to supply chain integration. Issues such as establishing data standards and designing corporation-wide integration architectures to alleviate future interoperability problems for PLM systems are also addressed. The conference also had a specific session focusing on the topics of interest to the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Network of Excellence (IMS NoE) program. A noteworthy feature of papers in the PLM'05 conference is that the lifecycle issues in other areas such as building construction, media and publishing and factory/plant construction are beginning to be addressed.

The conference provided a forum for academic and industrial researchers and practitioners to mingle and exchange ideas and concerns, through special industrial sessions, panel discussion, and demonstration and exhibition booths. In addition to this book, a printed booklet, containing the abstracts and the presentations, given at the industrial sessions and panel discussions by end-users and developers of PLM solutions, were distributed to all the conference participants. In these sessions, primarily the following topics were addressed: Challenges faced in "state of the art" PLM systems; Requirements engineering and concept development within PLM; Defining the roadmap of PLM value chain and; Academia and industry research collaboration, technology transfer and role of standards.

The conference also included keynote talks on the technical and management aspects of PLM, and on the strategic vision of the European Commission.

On behalf of the co-chairs, of the conference, of the conference organizing committee and of the program committee, we thank all the authors, reviewers, organizations that participated in the product showcase, sponsors and the conference program committee members for their help and support in putting this book together. We wish to acknowledge the effort and assistance of Néjib Moalla in setting up and maintaining the conference website and Philippe Pernelle in the preparation of this book and the CDROM proceedings.