A platform to integrate manufacturing engineering and product lifecycle management

The procedure for the creation of new products in industrial companies is typically distributed in different organizational units. Each of these units uses its specific methods and tools, resulting in a fragmented procedure with non-continuous flows of data and information. In this paper, an integrating but open platform for the engineering of products and production systems is introduced. To support engineers, the platform includes support modules based on semantics, heuristics, and visualization.