Policy Recommendations for Developments in
Product Data Technology
October 1997
prepared by PDTAG-AM

PDTAG-AM
Product Data Technology
Advisory Group
ESPRIT 9049

1 Executive Summary

What is PDT?

Product Data Technology (PDT) is an approach that facilitates product development and use by actively managing the information related to the products and processes used to create and use them. PDT includes all aspects of the definition, processing, storage, archiving and communicating of information pertinent to a product throughout its development and operational life-cycle. It provides a unified view of all the information required to define a product (for example by schematic drawings, data sheets, geometric models), information about the processes applied to the product during its life-cycle, and the management of that information.

PDT is different to earlier developments because it captures product information in information models to serve as a reference throughout the product life-cycle. This differs from the traditional approach in which specialised data is held separately for design (CAD), manufacturing (CAM) and so on. The new standard ISO 10303 (STEP) is an important foundation for these models: it enables software systems to communicate with each other using standard interfaces.

What is PDTAG?

The Product Data Technology Advisory Group (PDTAG) is a group of experts from a variety of backgrounds and industrial sectors with commercial, industrial, technical and academic interests in PDT. It has been funded more recently as a three-year project, concluded in July 1997, and undertaken as an accompanying measure to ESPRIT. Each year, it has produced a strategy paper with recommendations [2] [3], of which this edition is the most recent.

What is the Purpose of this Document?

The audience for the paper includes those with strategic management responsibility in industrial companies, in government and in the European Commission. This document provides a consolidated series of personal views of the PDTAG membership on issues related to PDT, such as how PDT interacts with other technologies, how it can be introduced and exploited by industry, and the likely societal effects including the increased education of the workforce. It also updates the information provided by the earlier papers on how PDT is being used by the various industrial sectors and in different European countries.

Required Actions

There is a series of required actions to ensure the full success of PDT [2]:

Expand the scope of the standards already in place;
Ensure software and expertise are available to support PDT;
Make users aware and capable of capitalising on PDT;
Show the possibilities for business success through PDT;
Support migration from the current diversity of approaches;
Ensure an effective and co-ordinated European capability, including research and development;
Plan for infrastructure and other related technologies.

Specific Recommendations

A number of specific recommendations for action to meet these objectives are made, throughout this report and in summary here, with responsibility for leadership of each, in order to assist European industry to adopt PDT. These most important recommendations are in a nutshell:

Industrial partners:
Use PDT as a means to integrate other initiatives so that benefits can be perceived clearly in an enterprise; these initiatives include the capture of design intent (particularly for functional and parametric design), electronic trading and invoicing, document management, enterprise data management, and the use of high-speed networks to support distributed computer-aided engineering.
Industrial partners:
Measure the commercial gains arising from the adoption of PDT in an enterprise, and to disseminate such success stories to any associated SMEs.
European Commission:
Provide a framework that allows inter-disciplinary research to be conducted particularly on the legal and societal implications of adopting PDT.
Academic institutions:
Provide awareness, training and education on PDT within a European-wide infrastructure.
EC User Group Reference Projects:
Continue to be used as a focus for gathering and disseminating information and ideas within a particular industrial sector. An EC-funded project should act as a similar focus across all industrial sectors, to ensure that solutions are not invented more than once and also do not conflict with one another.

More detailed recommendations are summarised in Table I.

World-wide, PDT is clearly providing demonstrable business benefits already. The investment required is high and the risk still too great for one party alone: A continuing partnership is needed between industry, academia and the public sector. In the short term, a sincere and sustained commitment from industry and substantial support from academia and public bodies are required to ensure that European industry exploits its information to the full, and hence remains competitive in the world-wide arena.

Table I: Summary of Recommendations

Subject	Ongoing co-ordination and infrastructure	Immediate (short-term) action	Developmental (longer term) action
Standardisation scope	Improve interaction with other IT standards (for documents, multimedia, networks)	Increase life-cycle coverage to repair, maintenance, demolition and recycling	Apply to business processes (workflow control, decision making and recording, procurement)
Software	Strengthen provision for ships, building and construction, process industries, electronic	Make industrial benchmark tests widely available to support implementation	Disseminate PC-based implementation technology
Education and dissemination	Facilitate implementation consortia (both end-user and toolkit providers) Spread successes of the demonstrator projects Raise SME management awareness	Provide graduate and postgraduate programmes of study for engineers and software developers Provide continuing and professional education	Develop pan-European awards in PDT Provide validated and accredited short courses
Demonstrator projects	Provide a European-wide infrastructure for cost-effective conformance and other testing	Measure economic benefits and evaluate trials Demonstrate migration paths from and incremental adoption of PDE standards	Determine consequences of cultural change Investigate interoperability with other standards (SGML, EDIFACT, GIS...)
Migration from current situation	Enable worldwide co-ordination in each industrial sector, and across sectors Improve interaction with other non-IT standards	Decrease standardisation time (simplify AP process) Facilitate AP inter-operation	Enable harmonisation across different industrial sectors Enable configurable AP subsets
Co-ordinated European approach	Utilise Framework Four clusters and user-reference projects	Ensure that industrial and national groups are linked at the European level	Provide an arena in which cross-sectoral issues can be resolved
Business planning	Increase interaction with and use of other data standards	Co-ordinate industrial influence on other data standards	Increase use of high-speed networks and concurrent engineering

Credit and Responsibility

The views expressed in these Policy Recommendations are based on individual contributions for which the authors take responsibility. Many views are shared by the PDTAG Group as a whole. The conclusions do not necessarily reflect a position held by the European Commission.

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