# Full Exploitation of Product Lifecycle Management by Integrating Static and Dynamic Viewpoints

Dario Antonelli, Giulia Bruno, Antonia Schwichtenberg, Agostino Villa

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Dario Antonelli, Giulia Bruno, Antonia Schwichtenberg, Agostino Villa. Full Exploitation of Product Lifecycle Management by Integrating Static and Dynamic Viewpoints. 19th Advances in Production Management Systems (APMS), Sep 2012, Rhodes, Greece. pp.176-183, 10.1007/978-3-642-40361-3_23. hal-01470618

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# Full exploitation of Product Lifecycle Management by
integrating static and dynamic viewpoints

Dario Antonelli¹, Giulia Bruno¹, Antonia Schwichtenberg², Agostino Villa¹

¹Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy

²Ontoprise GmbH, An der RaumFabrik 33a, 76227 Karlsruhe, Germany

**Abstract.** Even if PLM offers a wide range of functionalities, they are currently not fully exploited by most of the companies, which use it mainly as a file manager. In this paper we aim at helping the full exploitation of PLM systems. To this aim, we propose a model of the product lifecycle management in the form of an ontology integrating both the static structure of product's data and the dynamic description of the related processes.

**Keywords:** PLM modeling, information integration, ontology, UML, IDEF0

## 1 Introduction

Initially, to control data proliferation in design activities, Product Data Management (PDM) systems were created, which allowed data integration and secured files exchange. Within PDM the focus was on managing and tracking the creation, updating and storage of all information related to a product (e.g., CAD models, FE simulations and administrative documents). Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the logical evolution of PDM systems. PLM integrates people, data, software, processes and business systems to provide a complete product information backbone [16]. However, the concept of PLM is not completely received by companies, which do not exploit the full potentiality of PLM systems but use them only for data management functionalities. Especially for small and medium enterprise the exploitation of PLM is a problem due both to the lack of business process models and strict roles separation.

The paper provides an approach to allow a better exploitation of PLM systems by integrating static and dynamic viewpoints of product lifecycle. Particularly, we propose a model to contemporarily represent the data structure of PLM, thus allowing interoperability and data exchange among different systems, and the dynamic processes of product lifecycle. The model is presented in the form of an ontology, due to the ontology capability of including both the static representation (in its structure) and the dynamic view (in its instances).

Ontologies support several useful features, such as to share common understanding of the structure of information among human or software agents, to enable reuse of domain knowledge, to separate domain knowledge from operational knowledge and to provide formal analysis of terms [15]. Ontologies have already been proposed for knowledge management in product design processes [1]. Ontologies have been devel-
oped for closed-loop PLM [12], for the Open Assembly Model [6], and for STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product Model) [18]. A product design ontology that formalizes the functionality of shape processing methods in the design workflow is defined in [2], while an ontology to manage both the product and the PLM is proposed in [15]. A method for semantic integration of PLM objects based on an integrated ontology is described in [14] and the work in [17] uses ontologies for interoperability and present a model for using data of the entire life of the products as an input for the design and production of new products. Differently from the previous works, in which the ontologies were developed starting from general concepts of the product processes or from general models of PLM, we generated an ontology from the integration of the static structure of PLM and the dynamic description of the product lifecycle processes.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the dynamic model of product lifecycle, while Section 3 provides the static structure of PLM. In Section 4 the derived ontology is presented. Finally, Section 5 draws conclusions and states future works.

## 2 Dynamic model of product lifecycle

The dynamic (or behavioral) model makes explicit the processes and the interactions among entities involved in the product lifecycle. IDEF0 [4] is selected in the present study as a formalism for the dynamic representation due to two reasons: (i) it is a well-established methodology in the industrial environment, thus companies had less problems representing their processes with this formalism, and (ii) it is suitable to our scope because it allows the separate identification of resources, files and tools inside activities. Furthermore it was demonstrated that IDEF0 models can effectively complement UML models when the objective is the system design instead of the software development [3].

Product lifecycle is a complex process and it is composed by several phases. We focused on the Beginning of Product Life (BPL), trying to generalize the very detailed process of the car body and chassis design employed by an automotive industry. Since this process is among the most long and complex, it represents a good starting point to build a general model. BPL has been divided in Concept Design, Preliminary Design, Detailed Design, and Development. For sake of shortness we report in Fig.1 the overall activity diagram (A0) and in Fig.2 the details of the first activity, i.e., the Concept Design (A1). The concept design is composed of activities oriented to the definition of the schematic design of product and process and to the set-up of general project guidelines. Care should be paid to the fact that the position of blocks in the diagram does not represent the temporal sequence of activities. As an example, in the investigated companies the economic feasibility study follows the engineering feasibility study (see Fig.2).
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. IDEF0 diagram of product Beginning of Life</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2. IDEF0 diagram of Concept Design</figcaption></figure>
## 3 Static model of PLM

The static (or structural) model aims at representing the structure of the system by using entities, attributes, relationships and operations. The most used formalism for structural models is the Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagram [8], which has been already used to model PDM systems [5].

The UML class diagram of PLM is reported in Fig.3. The upper part of the diagram contains information about the product and its characteristics, while the most consistent part is focused on the product lifecycle management.

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3. UML class diagram of PLM</figcaption></figure>
the names as defined in the UML. For the attributes, it is possible to define ranges according to the XML Schema Definition [11]. So our model can be used together with any repository offering URIs for the documents stored there (e.g. by providing a REST interface).

Once the model has been developed, it is possible to fit it with the data providing from the behavioral models, i.e., to give real values to products, activities, files, re-sources, etc.. This forms the workflow within a concrete product lifecycle. Fig. 5 shows an example of an instantiation of our ontology for a Production Planning ac-tivity of a small industry.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4. Ontology of PLM</figcaption></figure>

We would like to clarify that the proposed ontology aims at helping companies that would like to adopt a PLM system, and thus need to first produce a behavioral model of their process, and then to organize the information about product lifecycle among the entities and relations specified by the static UML class diagram of PLM. To have
a more complete ontology of the system, additional information arising from the spe-
cific PLM software chosen by the company should be also considered.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 5.** Example of an instantiation of the PLM ontology for a Production Planning activity</figcaption></figure>

5 Conclusions

In this paper we describe an approach to full exploit PLM systems by integrating
static and dynamic viewpoints. Particularly, we propose a model of PLM in the form
of an ontology, due to the ontology capability of including both the static view (in its
structure) and the dynamic view (in its instances). We are currently working on apply-
ing our approach to some industrial cases to show how this general model can im-
prove the product lifecycle management.

Acknowledgments

The research presented in this paper is supported by the EU-FP7 research project
on Advanced Platform for Manufacturing Engineering and Product Lifecycle Man-
agement (amePLM).
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