Product lifecycle management and international standard : development of an holonic approach based on unified data model

Nowadays, enterprises are ever more stressed and subjected to high market requests. Customers are more and more sophisticated in terms of products quality and related service and the environmental impacts of the product and its production processes, is becoming a discriminating factor during the purchasing process. Moreover the legal requirements, in terms of product safety and sustainability, are much more pressing than few years ago. So that, enterprises have to consider the product, the processes and the resources involved, according to international standard in order to obtain important certifications of quality and sustainability which could consequently lead to competitive advantages. Thus, the “product” and its related management are becoming unavoidable key aspects for the creation of a “product centric” or “product-driven” approach. Starting with this new approach and thanks to the explosion of information technologies, is possible to create a new kind of concept, defined as Extend Product, where the product is more than a simple artifact, but it is a complex result of tangible and intangible components. The Product is represented as an Avatar, which is a virtual representation as a digital shadow, that contains all the information and knowledge of it. The large amount of data is organized in a model, designed with the aim of providing the information system with a basis for representing product data throughout the whole life-cycle. The target was to close the loop information around product, processes and all the resources involved in them, in order to obtain full life-cycle traceability and to record that, according to international standard. The creation of a data model infrastructure for ExtPLM is a long journey, which requires competences and efforts, so this work has been partially supported by a European funded project called PROMISE (PROduct lifecycle Management and Information tracking using Smart Embedded systems), which provides an unified data model pursued with the creation of a new product information tracking and flow management system in order to guarantee the availability of informations to all the actors involved in products life, ranging from managers, through service and maintenance operators, to end-of-life operators.