The Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) concept holds the promise of seamlessly integrating all the information produced throughout all phases of a product‘s life cycle to everyone in an organization at every managerial and technical level, along with key suppliers and customers. PLM systems are tools that implement the PLM concept. As such, they need the capability to serve up the information referred to above, and they need to ensure the cohesion and traceability of product data.

We describe a product information-modeling framework that we believe can support the full range of PLM information needs. The framework is based on the NIST Core Product Model (CPM) and its extensions, the Open Assembly Model (OAM), the Design-Analysis Integration model (DAIM) and the Product Family Evolution Model (PFEM). These are abstract models with general semantics, with the specific semantics about a particular domain to be embedded within the usage of the models for that domain. CPM represents the product‘s function, form and behavior, its physical and functional decompositions, and the relationships among these concepts. An extension of CPMprovides a way to associate design rationale with the product. OAM defines a system level conceptual model and the associated hierarchical assembly relationships. DAIM defines a Master Model of the product and a series of abstractions called Functional Models - one for each domain-specific aspect of the product - and two transformations, called idealization and mapping, between the master model and each functional model. PFEM extends the representation to families of products and their components; it also extends design rationale to the capture of the rationale for the evolution of the families.

The framework is intended to: (1) capture product, design rationale, assembly, and tolerance information from the earliest conceptual design stage - where designers deal with the function and performance of products - to the full lifecycle; (2) facilitate the semantic interoperability of next-generation CAD/CAE/CAM systems; and (3) capture the evolution of products and product families. The relevance of our framework to PLM systems is that any data component in the framework can be accessed directly by a PLM system, providing finegrained access to the product‘s description and design rationale.