Abstract
Today's manufacturing environment is becoming a distributed manufacturing process in which a unique and specialized technological background is required in specific domains rather than having a single company execute all the manufacturing processes. This phenomenon is especially true in the automotive industry, where the sharing of product data between companies is rampant; however, this kind of interoperability causes many problems. When each company has its own method of managing product data, the sharing of product data in a distributed environment is a major problem. A data translator module or a data mapping module had to be developed for the exchange of data in heterogeneous systems of product data management (PDM); moreover, this type of module must be continually changed and improved due to the fact that PDM systems change for many reasons. In addition, the growth in corporate partnerships deepens the burden of developing and maintaining this module and creates further data exchange problems due to the increasing complexity of the system. This paper introduces a way of exchanging product data among heterogeneous PDM systems through the use of OpenPDM, which is a kind of virtual data warehouse. The implementation of a PDM integrating system is also discussed with respect to the requirement for a logical integration of product data which are physically distributed.