Concepts and an Implementation for Product Data Management Doctorate Thesis Hannu Peltonen Helsinki University of Technology Department of Computer Science and Engineering P.O. Box 9555 FIN-02015 HUT, Finland [email protected] 2 Peltonen, H., Concepts and an Implementation for Product Data Manage- ment. Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica, Mathematics and Computing Series No. 105, Espoo 2000, 188 pp. Published by the The Finnish Academies of Technology. ISBN 951-666-538-1. ISSN 1456-9418. Keywords: Product data management, document management, configurable prod- ucts Abstract Shorter product life-cycles, growing product complexity and the need for a large number of product variants have made Product Data Management (PDM) increas- ingly important for many manufacturing companies. This thesis provides a survey of the most important concepts of PDM technology and illustrates the concepts by describing the design and implementation of an advanced document management system. The survey in the first part of the thesis illustrates the relations between different concepts and can be used as a framework for evaluating PDM systems. This part includes summaries of the STEP standards for product models and the IEC 6130 and ISO 13584 standards for component management. The STEP standards are partic- ularly difficult to read, and these sections of the thesis provide accessible introduc- tions to these very complex standards. The document management system described in the second part of the thesis has been developed in close co-operation with a large manufacturing company, which now stores all engineering documents in the system and accesses the system through a global intranet. The main strengths of the system are its versatile document model and the flexible customisation properties of the system, including dynamic schema manipulation operations and a programmable authorisation mechanism. One particular topic in the thesis is product configuration. The first part intro- duces a framework for configurable products in terms of an explicit structure and constraints. The second part discusses different ways to add product family struc- tures to the implemented system. © All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored, or trans- mitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, record- ing, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the author. 3 Preface The work reported in this thesis was completed between 1991 and 1999 within the Product Data Management Group (PDMG) at the TAI Research Centre at the Hel- sinki University of Technology. The work was done in multiple projects, which were mainly financed by the National Technology Agency of Finland (Tekes) and KONE Elevators. Some projects were part of the Rapid programme co-ordinated by the Federation of Finnish Metal, Engineering and Electrotechnical Industries (MET). My first thanks go to professor Reijo Sulonen, who has supervised the preparation of this thesis and has guided the research group. I also thank Kim Gunell, Asko Mar- tio, Tomi Männistö, Kati Sarinko, Timo Soininen and Juha Tiihonen for giving me the opportunity to work in a stimulating and pleasant research environment. It has been wunderful to know you and all the other people at our office in Spektri Duo. I hope we shall work together, and occasionally also meet outside the office, for many more years. I would also like to thank Dr. Peter van den Hamer for important comments that improved the thesis crucially in its last stages. I have designed and implemented most of the server of the EDMS document management system. The original model for generic product structures in EDMS was developed by Asko Martio. Timo Nyyssönen has implemented the object filters in the server. Kari Alho implemented the X/Motif user interface of the EDMS. The original object manager was implemented by Kari Alho, Tomi Männistö and myself. The Java user interface was originally implemented as a student project by Janne Kontkanen, Sami Vaarala, Phuoc Tran Minh, Janne Huttunen, Pekka Salmia, Kim Gunell and Teppo Peltonen. Kim Gunell has joined our research group and contin- ues the development of the interface. Fredrik Nyberg at KONE Elevators has also written some parts of the user interface. The object manager of the Java user interface is now being developed by Kim Gunell and myself. The success of EDMS has depended on the support of people at KONE Eleva- tors. Asko Martio was in charge of the EDMS project at KONE before joining our research group. Without his faith in the project there would be no system to write a thesis about. Asko’s work at KONE has been continued by Matti Eskola, who has been the best possible promoter for the system both within and outside the company. Heikki Karhunen and Jorma Heimonen have been responsible for actually making the system run at KONE. Jorma Heimonen has also written the Web tools, which have been crucial for the success of the whole project. I have written the Application Programming Interface of EDMS, which has been used by Jarmo Ukkola and Kalevi Turkia at Vertex Systems Oy to implement a link between EDMS and the Vertex CAD program. At KONE Elevators, the Vertex link has been managed by Jussi Nissi. 4 The English language of the thesis has been checked by Ms Kathleen Tipton. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Marja for the most important things in life: love and companionship. Helsinki, May 2000 Hannu Peltonen 5 Contents Abstract . 2 Preface . 3 Contents. 5 List of Figures . 11 1 Introduction . 13 1.1 History of the Thesis . 13 1.2 Contributions of the Thesis . 14 1.3 Methods. 15 1.4 Structure of the Thesis . 15 Part I: Product Data Management Concepts 2 Product Data and Product Data Management . 18 2.1 Product Data . 18 2.2 Product Data Management. 18 2.3 Basic Functions of a PDM System. 19 2.4 PDM Projects . 21 3 Data Models . 22 3.1 Metamodels and Company Models . 22 3.2 Basic Data Modelling Concepts . 24 3.2.1 Objects and Types . 24 3.2.2 Attributes . 28 3.2.3 Relations . 33 3.3 Products. 34 3.3.1 Product Structures . 35 3.3.2 Configurable Products . 37 3.4 Documents . 47 3.5 Versioning . 50 3.5.1 Revisions. 50 3.5.2 Version Trees and Graphs . 52 3.5.3 Variants. 53 3.5.4 Configurable Documents. 54 3.5.5 Revisions and Variants Combined. 54 3.5.6 Component Versions . 55 3.5.7 Larger Versioning Units. 57 3.5.8 Configurable Products and Versions. 58 6 4 Design Management. 60 4.1 Design Transactions . 60 4.1.1 Traditional Transactions . 61 4.1.2 Transactions in PDM. 61 4.2 Check-out/Check-in . 62 4.3 Locking . 63 4.4 States . 64 4.5 Dependencies . 64 4.6 Workflows . 65 4.7 Documentation of the Design Process . 65 5 System Aspects . 67 5.1 System Architecture . 67 5.2 Metamodels and Company Models in Relational Databases . 68 5.3 Schema Customisation . 72 5.4 Access Control . 73 5.5 Integration between PDM and Other Systems . 74 5.5.1 PDM and Document Tools. 74 5.5.2 PDM and ERP Systems. 75 6 PDM Standards . 76 6.1 STEP Standard . 76 6.1.1 Express Language . 76 6.1.2 External Representation of EXPRESS Data . 81 6.1.3 Integrated Resources . 82 6.1.4 Application Protocols . 85 6.1.5 STEP and Generic Product Structures. 86 6.2 Component and Supplier Management . 88 Part II: EDMS Document Management System 7 Background on the EDMS Project . 93 7.1 KONE Elevators . 93 7.2 Project Starting Point and Goals . 93 7.3 Motivation for an In-house System . 94 8 EDMS Data Model . 96 8.1 EDMS Administrators . 96 8.2 Object Kinds . 97 8.3 Documents and Files . 97 8.4 Document Versions . 97 8.4.1 General Document Version Model. 98 8.4.2 Document Versions at KONE . 98 7 8.5 Subdocuments and Subdocument Versions. 100 8.5.1 Dropped.