Purposeful integration of product models into the product development process

In many current product development processes, engineers spend a lot of time in the search for essential information and transformation of documents into useful data formats. This problem does not only exist in the design phase, but also in all other product lifecycle stages. Reasons are the huge amount of data and a way of structuring product models in Electronic Document Management (EDM) systems, which is independent from the designer's situation. Hence, adequate retrieval services for information are needed to improve efficiency of the engineer's every day work life and in consequence for the product development process. For a better access to product models, the engineer's design situation has to be related to product models. Hence, a linkage between the development process and the product models could provide useful support for the engineer. In this context, a systematic method is to be developed, which helps to describe product models in a process oriented way. The method aims at a dynamic and automatic integration of product models into the product development process, which is not provided with current practice in the field of product model integration. To achieve that goal, description parameters are used, which support a structured storage and retrieval of process and product information. This approach provides a dynamic and flexible integration of product models into the product development process, which leads to better access to relevant information and facilitates its introduction in the industry.