Efficient assembly of product structures in worldwide distributed client/server environments

Abstract

The efficient management of product-related data is a big challenge for many manufacturing companies, especially the larger ones like DaimlerChrysler. So-called Product Data Management (PDM) systems are used to tackle this task. But especially in worldwide distributed product development environments, where low bandwidth networks are used, response times of PDM systems often raise to several minutes even for simple user actions. The main reason for this is the amount of wide area network communication caused by poor implementations of PDM systems which a) often use the underlying database management system like a stupid record manager, and b) do hardly know anything about the distribution of the data. In this paper we introduce an extension of directed acyclic graphs which enables us to adequately represent product structures. On the basis of this representation we show how some additional information describing the data distribution can be used to assemble distributed product structures very efficiently.