Decision Support at a New Global Level Definition of Products in PLM Systems

Knowledge based support of decision making in product definition using modeling system may produce the advantage of coordination different opinions, attempts, and intents. In order to achieve this, special interaction between engineer and product object definition processes was proposed by the authors in order to communicate content for decision in the form of expertise and experience based knowledge. This knowledge is required to represent engineer in the course of coordinated definition of product objects. This chapter introduces a new method in order to establish a global level of the decision making on product object parameters. Global level control organizes product object generation processes on the local level of currently applied product entity definition. Local level processes should be modified in order to accept control from the global level. This control replaces direct human definition of product object parameters. Other new methodological element in the proposed modeling is that the only allowed way of product object definition is through definition of function and quality based behaviors of product. The main contribution of this chapter is introduction of the contextual chains along which communication is done from human thinking to product model entity parameter generation. The proposed method is demanded to be capable of serving product model definition for lifecycle in a product lifecycle management (PLM) system.