Integrated management of automotive product heterogeneous data: Application case study

Abstract

The product development process (PDP) in innovative companies is becoming more and more complex, encompassing many diverse activities, and involving a big number of actors, spread across different professions, teams and organizations. One of the major problems is that development activities usually depend on many different inputs and influencing factors, and that the information that is needed in order to make the best possible decisions is either not documented or embodied in data that is spread over many different IT-systems. In this context a suitable knowledge management approach is required that must ensure the integration and availability of required information along with the federation and interoperability of the different Enterprise tools. This paper presents a description of an industrial use case application where the innovative methodology researched in the iProd project is adopted. This methodology aims at improving the efficiency and quality of the Product Development Process (PDP) by means of a software ontological framework. The methodology is first briefly outlined and then its application is illustrated with an automotive application case developed together with Pininfarina. This case demonstrates how it is possible to capture and reuse the knowledge and design rationale of the PDP. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.