Make the Most of Interoperability Along Product Life Cycle Stages: A Framework Based on Multilevel Integration

Within the globally scaled economy and markets, the production process is re-emerging as the value-creator activity and the main source of enterprise revenues. The worldwide growing market contributes to the increase of customers’ exigencies, in terms of both quality and delivery times. Therefore, the product itself is becoming more complex as a combination of physical components and services, and the production process conceptualization is changing, starting from market understanding, through product and process design, to operations and distribution management, often exceeding the boundaries of a single organization. According to this scenario, the activities performed along the production process should be effectively coordinated and managed within the organization and with the external partners. To accomplish it, production must converge to a single global integrated process, enabled by seamless interoperability between the already operating tools, methods and computational environments. A challenge now is how to make the most of information and knowledge interoperability along the Product Life Cycle stages. The paper contributes to this aim, proposing a standard-based methodology to re-use data and knowledge incorporated in the product models, to support collaborative engineering through a modular multilevel architecture.