Towards a PLM interoperability for a collaborative design support system

Because of the increasing complexity of systems, their variability, and constant evolution of customer needs, engineering design has become more and more challenging and requires the collaboration between heterogeneous teams holding expertise in specific design-tasks. Thus, design outcomes of each expert field have to be put together without affecting the global design integrity. Typical enterprise application integration solutions propose dedicated tools which allow the coupling between engineering software by mapping data representation from one tool to another. This may result in a considerable mass of one-to-one interlinked software, which cannot provide an overall coherence between data. In this paper we propose a prototype enabling the interoperability between PLM systems and external engineering tools, with respect to the coherence concerns mentioned previously. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.