Killing the PLM Monolith - the Emergence of cloud-native System Lifecycle Management (SysLM)

The rapid increase of complexity in modern products introduces numerous challenges for manufac-turing companies around the globe. Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is seen as the best choice to handle this huge increase in complexity and as one cornerstone to realize the so called Digital Thread. In many industries MBSE constitutes an additional engineering discipline that needs to be established in organizations and that comes with sophisticated digital models which have not been used before. In fact, it also needs to be accompanied with the right set of tools, processes and methods – and with the right open, scalable and flexible IT-architecture to make it reality. On the one side MBSE needs mature Lifecycle and Configuration Management – on the other hand it must live within an open IT-environment satisfying the need to have the right set of engineering data always just a click away. This paper shows why legacy monolithic PLM tools cannot support the introduction of MBSE and are currently preventing the implementation of the Digital Thread vision. Instead, it postulates a modern cloud-native Web architecture based on Microservices and Linked Data that allows compa-nies to introduce MBSE on the large scale and helps to avoid the establishment of just yet another silo. Only with Linked Data and a modern open Web architecture MBSE can unfold its full potential and is able to find its way into the daily work of engineers.