PDM data classification from step - An object oriented string matching approach

To increase product competitiveness, current manufacturing enterprises have to deliver their products at reduced cost and high quality in a short time. Traditional production patterns and manufacturing technologies may find it difficult to satisfy the requirements of current product development. Many types of advanced manufacturing techniques, such as Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), Agile Manufacturing (AM), Concurrent Engineering (CE), and Virtual Enterprise (VE) based on global manufacturing have been proposed to meet these requirements. Information systems have become the nerve center of current manufacturing systems. So some new requirements on information modeling are introduced. The main focus of this paper is to determine the requirements of a data classification for STEP-Product data entities that supports integrity validation and verification. In this paper we develop an object oriented database tool to retrieve and store the product model data from a STEP file using JAVA based PDM-string matching algorithm. Finally this tool operates around a model that uses a well-defined configuration management strategy to manage and storage of product model data.