Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2007) 33: 614–626
DOI 10.1007/s00170-006-0482-x
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
C. S. Sung
.
Sam Joon Park
A component-based product data management system
Received: 18 April 2005 / Accepted: 25 October 2005 / Published online: 30 March 2006
# Springer-Verlag London Limited 2006
Abstract Companies today have been attempting to
expand their Internet infrastructures to cope with the
growth of global business environments. In modern
manufacturing industries, they are migrating their legacy
product data management (PDM) systems to Web-based
systems (being an essential tool of eManufacturing) to use
the Internet. Accordingly, recent advances in PDM tech-
nology 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 paper 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 the 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, which is implemented as Enterprise
JavaBeans (EJB) components to handle the core PDM
functionality. The third level is the data tier, composed of a
database and vault for the physical files. To develop the
components of the CPDM system, a component-based
development (CBD) approach is proposed. The associated
component development procedure is illustrated with
examples. The CPDM system is also tested for its
performance.
Keywords PDM
.
J2EE
.
EJB
.
Component-based
product data management system
.
Global manufacturing
environment
1 Introduction
Nowadays, as manufacturing markets become more
globalized and borderless, multinational organizations are
spreading all over the globe. For example, many Korean
companies have extended their local organizations in
Europe, America, and China for manufacturing, marketing,
and product sales. They have made significant inroads into
China’s markets to take advantage of lower labor costs and
to enlarge their share of the Chinese market for
semiconductors, electronics, automobiles, steel, and con-
sumer items. In today’s business world, decreasing the
cycle time for introducing new technology and products is
very important. Accordingly, companies are capitalizing on
using global outsourcing instead of long-term, in-house
development and production. Such globalization is becom-
ing the common way of doing business.
It is well known that product data management (PDM) is
the essential technology of concurrent engineering. PDM
can manage and control engineering information and
function as a tool to integrate many different product-
related pieces of information. It allows authorized users to
access relevant product data, all of the time, and with the
assurance that it is always the latest version. PDM gives
multiple advantages in terms of productivity and competi-
tiveness, such as reducing time-to-market, improving
design and manufacturing accuracy, and improving project
management. Despite these benefits, however, there are
some shortfalls in traditional PDM systems because of the
flux of the global manufacturing environment. For
example, PDM systems have access limits to users at
different locations, which are not easy to extend. To
overcome such deficiencies, some legacy PDM systems
have been modified. However, most commercial off-the-
shelf (COTS) products have not taken full advantage of
Web-based technology. The next step under globalized
C. S. Sung (*)
.
S. J. Park
Department of Industrial Engineering,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST),
Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 305–701, South Korea
e-mail: cssung@kaist.ac.kr
Tel.: +82-42-8693131
Fax: +82-42-8693110
e-mail: samjoon@hanafos.com
