Improving PDM Systems Integration Using Software Agents

This paper addresses challenges in integrating distributed and heterogeneous Product Data Management (PDM) systems, introduces a virtual enterprise oriented agents-based integration solution, and presents an infrastructure with interactive and communicative agents as community and domain services to support distributed management of documents, BOMs, workflows and engineering knowledge, and secure communication in a collaborative product development environment. Considering the standardized Web. based agents and fundamental product data managed by PDM systems, the proposed paradigm is scalable and can also be used to integrate business systems in manufacturing enterprises.