Special issue on: New Research Advances in Product Lifecycle Management
Authors: J. Yan; X. Ming; Wen Feng Lu; X. F. Zha
Year: 2008

In the modern global economy, companies are facing ever-increasing challenges for shortening time-to-market, for entering new market early, for developing market share, and for maximizing returns on their investments. Product lifecycle management (PLM) is recognized as one of the key leading technologies to overcome these challenges. PLM offers companies an integrated way to rapidly plan, organize, manage, measure, and deliver new products or services to their customers. PLM provides customers, developers, manufacturers, and suppliers with the most effective means of collaboratively managing business activities throughout product development. PLM supports the capability of creation, management, share, and use of product data, information, and knowledge in virtual enterprise networks by integrating people, processes, and technology. PLM systems manage a portfolio of products, processes, and services from its initial conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal. Following this trend, this special issue collects a series of recent achievements on the research, development and application of model, framework, standard, ontology, collaboration, and so on in PLM domain. Ni, Lu, and Yarlagaddaa reported the research result on ‘An Extensible Product Structure Model for Product Lifecycle Management in the Make-to-Order Environment’, which focuses on the master-variant pattern for building the product structure model to explicitly represent common characteristics and specific features of individual variants in the make-to-order business context. Wang et al. proposed the collaborative project management with supplier involvement in product lifecycle, with a scenario of what and how to collaborate with supplier, the system architecture, and the corresponding function, information, process collaboration methods. Ma, Jiao, andDeng developed the web service oriented electronic catalogs for product customization, in such a way that users can source competitive offers and generate feature-based CAD models from different vendors over the Internet with the key technique of the feature markup descriptions for the requested library elements. Fan and Bermell-Garcia shared the international standard development for knowledge-based engineering services for product lifecycle management, with the aim to facilitate the integration of KBE applications in a PLM environment, to support PLM evolving from the platform to manage engineering data to the repository of complete enterprise knowledge. Kulvatunyou et al. depicted the research on the development life cycle for semantically coherent data exchange specification to support reuse, promotes interoperability, and, consequently, reduces integration costs with an activity model for the creation, test, and maintenance of a shared semantic model. Sun and Jiang represented the research on tracking online workpiece machining procedure in a mobile collaborative environment, with a ubiquitousmachining tracking implementation in the mobile collaborative infrastructure. Users with different roles-playing are able to track the machining quality and progress, and to cooperate with each other, despite of their geographical places. Lee and Suh developed an ontology-based multilayered knowledge framework for PLM, including a systematic lattice structure with three product knowledge types of axioms, knowledge maps, specialized knowledge for a domain; and four layers of a product context model, a product specific model, a product planning model, and a product manufacturing model. *Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: xgming@sjtu.edu.cn