Chapter 8: Project Management

Title: Open Standards for Product Lifecycle Management

Author(s): Vijay Srinivasan

Address: IBM Corporation and Columbia University White Plains, NY 10604, U.S.A.

Reference: International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 2005 pp. 475 - 484

Abstract/Summary: Open standards are set by public organizations and are freely accessible to users without restriction. Standards issued by ISO (e.g., STEP, GD&T), W3C (e.g., XML) and OMG (e.g., UML) are examples of such open standards. There is ever increasing demand for open standards to facilitate smooth and accurate information flow between various Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems. It started with geometric information and has now spread to all aspects of the product throughout its lifecycle. This has forced us to formalize many of the existing information models, change them if necessary, create new ones if they didn't exist, and harmonize them. It is not surprising that this is a challenging task. It is further exasperated by changes brought about by the fast moving information technology. Nevertheless, there have been several success stories that give us reason to believe that open standards can indeed provide computer-sensible representations of product information to integrate and interoperate PLM systems. This paper surveys the open standards landscape of PLM, current activities, and what future they hold.

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