Combining heterogeneous PLM environments with grid computing and virtual reality applications

Virtual product creation applications increasingly need data from heterogeneous PLM environments. Nowadays in common collaborations or in Virtual Organizations, this situation is even more complicated, because several organizational units and enterprises work together in a field of dispersed and heterogeneous data management systems. This paper introduces an integration solution to provide application systems with required data. It focuses on two use cases in virtual product creation. The first use case concerns with resource sharing in virtual organizations by grid computing in the context of product and simulation data management. The second use case deals with data preparation for virtual reality applications. Despite their differences, both use cases have many requirements in common for transparent data management. The realized concepts implement solutions for data collection, secure transports and authentication for users and systems in heterogeneous PLM environments. For this, it uses several standards, e.g. PLM Services, web services, X.509.