This book is a collective effort of the contributors to the International Conference on Product Life Cycle Management (PLM'08) held at the University in Seoul, South Korea in July 2008. The four former conferences in the series were successively held in Bangalore (2003), Lyon (2005), Bangalore (2006) and Milan (2007). The success of these conferences and the large growing interest in the PLM field, led us to continue holding the conference every year. 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 value chain.

Today, value creation and innovation has become the key to business models that are economically and socially sustainable. They correspond to the challenge of creating frameworks together with collaborative practices and strategies that support economic growth and consider all the economic and societal partners in the process. Indeed, enterprises and clusters are now competing in a global and dynamic environment where they need more innovation and research as well as access to distributed value chains and knowledge networks to be able to deliver products and services that are in some sense unique. However, in such a volatile and competitive environment, strategic behavior is no longer a matter of positioning a fixed set of activities along a physical value chain. The focus is instead on development of the value creating system itself.

The conference provided a forum for academic and industrial researchers and practitioners to mingle and exchange ideas and concerns, through two-day scientific sessions and one specific industrial day (presentations, panel discussion, demonstration and exhibition booths). The conference also included international keynote talks on the technical and management aspects, from academic and industrial PLM leaders, showing that the time has come to realize the promise of fostering the development of new technologies, applications and services that are critical to achieving higher growth and greater social consideration. The academic and industrial sessions also showed that the success of the enterprises heavily depends on their core innovation process, which is closely linked to their ability to collaborate and interoperate; but also on their willingness to adapt and to accept change, especially on the people that must form interorganizational and cross-functional teams to collaboratively develop and manage products.

The conference program committee and reviewers from around the world reviewed a large number of research papers submitted, and selected the most relevant among them. The papers presented in this book represent the current status of research in many of the issues that need to be understood and resolved and cover a broad spectrum of topics from Models for Products and Systems Integration, Frameworks and Reference Models, Supporting Technologies, to Architectures and Best Practices. Issues such as Process management and Sustainable Products and future reuse have also been addressed. Application areas such as construction, contracting sectors, Aeronautics have been covered.

This book aspires to be ambitious, and should serve as a useful reference and a renewed commitment of the contributors involved in its conception and engaged in the development of the long-term vision of the research surrounding the PLM area. In addition to this book, a USB memory stick containing the all the papers, has been distributed to all the conference participants.

On behalf of all different committees of the conference, we thank all the authors for submitting, revising and extending their original papers; the conference program committee members and the reviewers for their valuable help and support. We wish to acknowledge the effort and assistance of the local organizers in setting up and maintaining the conference website and in the preparation of the USB proceedings. We are also deeply thankful to Soumaya El Kadiri for her availability and help for the edition of this book.

Abdelaziz Bouras, Balan Gurumoorthy, Chris McMahon, Karthik Ramani. (Editors)