Research on key technologies of complex product virtual prototype lifecycle management (CPVPLM)

As a new product design and development method, virtual prototyping is the advanced research in the modeling and simulation (M&S) field. Nowadays virtual prototyping has evolved into a virtual prototype engineering. Considering that PDM/PLM systems are unable to manage the characteristics of models/content/knowledge of complex product virtual prototype (CPVP) and lifecycle of CPVP, this paper gives the concept of complex product virtual prototype lifecycle management (CPVPLM). Then, the author presents and discusses a three-dimensional (3D) view to reinforce the share and management of the CPVP lifecycle information. Moreover, the paper gives and studies a framework to solve the lifecycle management of CPVP. To manage the digital content in CPVPLM, the content management technology is introduced. To add semantic description information into the documents and models, the ontology technology is introduced. Finally the article introduces the use of CPVPLM prototype system, and gives an illustrative application example.