SOA approach for Product Lifecycle management, part 2nd:

SOA Reference Architecture for product lifecycle management

Introduction: Part 1th discusses how Product Lifecycle management (Products Lifecycle Management, PLM) environments vary, and the need to integrate a large number of processes and information sources as part of a complex PLM ecosystem. This paper studies how to apply SOA technology to achieve many of these goals.

The organizational structure of this section is as follows:

The "Decomposition PLM Domain" illustrates how PLM ecosystems are divided into many PLM disciplines.

The SOA Reference Architecture for PLM describes the Reference architecture for applying SOA technologies in PLM domains.

"Applying SOA to each PLM discipline" illustrates how SOA technology is applied to each PLM discipline.

Decompose PLM domains

The PLM domain can be decomposed into several disciplines. The following list is not exhaustive, but contains many of the most important PLM procedures:

Product Data Management

This procedure refers to the management of product data in the product design phase

Analog Data management

This procedure refers to the management of numerical-intensive analog data for each product configuration

Manufacturing Data Management

This procedure refers to the management of the bill of materials used in the manufacturing phase

Service Data Management

This procedure refers to the management of service data during the life of a product asset

Engineering Change Management

This procedure refers to the process of controlling the change request flow throughout the product lifecycle.

Note that the first four procedures are related to data management in each phase of the product lifecycle. The final procedure, engineering change management (Engineering changes MANAGEMENT,ECM), is the business process management (Business process management,bpm) discipline that spans all phases of the product lifecycle.

Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between these procedures and the product lifecycle.

Figure 1. PLM Procedures and Product lifecycle

Figure 1 shows how four data management disciplines correspond to each phase of the product lifecycle, while ECM procedures span all phases. We can now discuss how to use SOA technology to address many of the challenges discussed in the "Challenges" section of the first section, where we discussed the diversity of application scenarios and the complexity of the IT environment. These challenges make it difficult for data and processes to flow smoothly through the lifecycle phases of each product. We can classify the main issues discussed in the "Challenge" as follows: