IPDMAS: An Integrated Product Data Management System

With the increasing volume of product data and more active changes between the parties which are involved in the more complicated product development life cycle, it is necessary to develop a multimedia software tool to manage the product data within an activity or across the activities. This proposal suggests the development of IPDMAS, an Integrated Product Data Management System, to manage and access the distributed product data which are created and may be owned by different involved activities. The Phase I SBIR research will reengineer the product development process, identify the major tasks which are performed in manufacturing and rework facilities and the interrelationships between the tasks, analyze the currently available technology for integrating product data, define a complete set of data objects and attributes which can be consistently used to communicate across the enterprise, develop a methodology to provide the readily access to the integrated product data, and specify the framework of IPDMAS.