A component-based product data management system

Companies today have been attempting to expand their Internet infrastructures to cope with the growth of global business environments. In modern manufacturing industries, they are migrating their legacy product data management (PDM) systems to Web-based systems (being an essential tool of eManufacturing) to use the Internet. Accordingly, recent advances in PDM technology have dealt with the use of Web-based technology. Some research and development on Web-based PDM systems has been described in the literature, but those efforts have technical limits. They are not adequately available, secure, reliable, and scalable for global enterprise services. This paper describes the design of a component-based product data management (CPDM) system for supporting global manufacturing. The CPDM system is aimed at assuring flexibility, security, stability, and maintainability by utilizing a standard architecture of J2EE technology. The CPDM system consists of three tiers based on the J2EE architecture. The first is the presentation tier implemented as JSP/servlet components to allow users to access the system through a Web browser. The second is the business logic tier, which is implemented as Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) components to handle the core PDM functionality. The third level is the data tier, composed of a database and vault for the physical files. To develop the components of the CPDM system, a component-based development (CBD) approach is proposed. The associated component development procedure is illustrated with examples. The CPDM system is also tested for its performance.