Towards an enhancement of relationships browsing in mature PLM systems

Abstract

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) domain is at a key point in its development: its concepts and technologies are mature. PLM systems not only manage documents but information associated to a product along its lifecycle, such as Bills-Of-Material (BOM) or require- ments at different levels of granularity. All the dependencies between concepts lead to complex relationships from which it is not easy to get a coherent overview. The purpose of the paper is to know whether PLM systems are able to deal relationships complexity. Two case studies – one form manufacturing industry and the other one from a new application domain of PLM, Bio-Medical Imaging - are developed in the paper. They show that hierarchical browsing of existing PLM systems is not suitable to manage relationships complexity and must evolve to graph browsing.