Light-weight Representations for Product Lifecycle Management

The objective of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is to enable companies to be more effective in product development and more competitive in globalisation. Modern companies have high requirements for product development tools, such as better support of multi-view representations, greater compatibility of various representation schemes, and effective information sharing between geographically distributed users. Conventional product representations, e.g., geometric or feature-based Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models, are unable to meet such requirements due to platform/application-dependency, bulky CAD files, technical restriction in design/engineering applications, etc. To overcome these problems, a major research topic in PLM is to develop light-weight product representation schemes to support users at the different lifecycle stages of a product in sharing, browsing, retrieving and manipulating product information rapidly and conveniently. This paper presents a survey of the light-weight representations in PLM, including light-weight 3D visualisation schemes, lifecycle representation schemes combined with mark-up languages, and desiccated formats.