Design of a component-based product data management system

Abstract

Companies today have been attempting to expand their Internet infrastructures to cope with the growth of global business environments. In manufacturing industries, they are changing their legacy PDM (Product Data Management) systems into web-based systems (being an essential tool of eManufaturing) to use the Internet. Accordingly, recent advances in PDM technology have dealt with the use of web-based technology. Some research and development on web-based PDM systems has been described in the literature, but those efforts have technical limits. They are not adequately available, secure, reliable and scalable for global enterprise services. This thesis describes the design of a Component-based Product Data Management (CPDM) system for supporting global manufacturing. The CPDM system is aimed at assuring flexibility, security, stability, and maintainability by utilizing a standard architecture of J2EE technology. The CPDM system consists of three tiers based on J2EE architecture. The first is the presentation tier implemented as JSP/servlet components to allow users to access the system through a web browser. The second is the business logic tier that is implemented as EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) components to handle the core PDM functionality. The third one is the data tier composed of a database and vault for the physical files. To develop the components of the CPDM system, a CBD (Component Based Development) approach is proposed. The associated component development procedure is illustrated with the examples. The components of the CPDM system have high cohesion and low coupling to assure reusability and easy upgrade for the system. The CPDM system is also tested for performance. An extension approach of the CPDM system for SCM (Software Configuration Management) will be suggested. The components that must be newly developed or modified will be identified from the functional requirements for SCM. Another extension approach of the CPDM system for CMMI is consi...