Development of product engineering skills with PLM applications through collaborative educational projects

Abstract

In the industrial discipline of product design and manufacturing, training and learning methods for last academic course engineering students is difficult and complex since they have to integrate technical knowledge with computer-aided applications (CAx) and new skills in collaborative work. With the trends of Industry 4.0, companies request new talents and improved competences from the very first time. The fact that Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platforms with a huge variety of tools support structured collaborative practices drives us to use them as a gear to integrate all the engineering and put it into practice for engineering content creation. In this contribution we present an innovative academic project for the last academic course students integrating several subjects in order to develop an industrial project working in a PLM platform. The platform allows us to control not only the data but also the scheduled activities of a project while the participants use different engineering applications in each phase of the project. Traditionally, engineering education deals with the learning of CAD, CAE and CAM tools separately, giving a partial learning experience and vision to the students. This communication presents a structured integrated vision of this learning project and the achieved results.