Distributed data management in product development using Git

Abstract

Product development takes place in a multidisciplinary environment. Due to this, product data are very different in nature. Furthermore, the manner of how companies collaborate changes. The importance of development networks increases. The changing conditions also affect methods and tools that are used in product data management. In this paper, the relevance of distributed product data management is emphasised. Two existing approaches that introduce P2P technology for PDM systems are mentioned, and possible reasons why they are not used in productive PDM systems up ton now are named. Based on this, an alternative distributed PDM approach which focuses on file integration and which uses open source software is presented.