Integrated and Consistent Management of Product-Process Information

The paper describes an approach to product relationships management in the context of concurrent engineering and product lifecycle management (PLM). Current industrial practices in Product Data Management and Manufacturing Process Management systems require better efficiency, flexibility, and sensitivity in managing product information at various levels of abstraction throughout its lifecycle. The aim of the proposed work is to manage vital yet complex and inherent product relationship information to enable concurrent product design and assembly sequence planning. Indeed, the definition of the product with its assembly sequence requires the management and the understanding of the numerous product relationships, ensuring consistency between the product and its components. This main objective stresses the relational design paradigm by focusing on product relationships along its lifecycle. This paper gives the detailed description of the background and models which highlight the need for a more efficient PLM approach; then the theoretical approach is described.