ORIGINAL ARTICLE OpenPDM-based product data exchange among heterogeneous PDM systems in a distributed environment Jeongsam Yang & Soonhung Han & Matthias Grau & Duhwan Mun Received: 19 May 2007 / Accepted: 11 January 2008 / Published online: 16 February 2008 # Springer-Verlag London Limited 2008 Abstract In a global product development environment, more and more companies are implementing distributed engineering processes in order to shorten the time to market and merge different core competences. One of the important issues in collaborative product development during the whole product creation is to easily and quickly access the digital product definition models and documents of relevant partners. The essential problems of product data distribution are that each partner has to know what information to find in which system, how to collect the necessary information from individual systems, and how to assemble partial information so that it becomes complete. Even more difficult is the need to ensure the partner adapts to every change in the distribution model of information. To solve these problems, we propose the OpenPDM-based product data exchange method among heterogeneous PDM systems, which is a concept of a virtual data warehouse that provides data access to all partners in a distributed environment. The method is effective for partners who require real-time access to data residing in multiple heterogeneous PDM systems. We also implemented an integrated PDM system for logically linking product data which are physically distributed, and we used this system in a data exchange experiment. Keywords Data exchange . Distributed data management . OpenPDM . PDTnet . Product data management (PDM) . STEP PDM schema 1 Introduction In the manufacturing industry, the system of product data management (PDM) consists of a co-axis system with enterprise resource planning (ERP). PDM is an information infrastructure that facilitates the collection, saving, and management of a variety of product data in the life cycle of a product. The data ranges from conceptual definitions of products to details of the design, development, manufacture, and delivery of products, as well as customer service. The ERP system offers a way of describing and executing business activities as well as storing data on business activities in an integrated database. In contrast, the PDM system offers a way of managing and providing reference data on various parts and products from the overall business activities. In other words, the reference data of products and parts are the most basic data in manufacturing; they are analogous to the way in which personal types of information, Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2009) 40:1033–1043 DOI 10.1007/s00170-008-1399-3 DO01399; No of Pages J. Yang (*) Division of Industrial & Information System Engineering, Ajou University, San 5, Wonchun-dong, Yeongtong-gu, Suwon 443-749, Republic of Korea e-mail: jyang@ajou.ac.kr S. Han Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, 373-1, Gusong-Dong, Yusong-Gu, Daejeon 305-701, Republic of Korea e-mail: shhan@kaist.ac.kr M. Grau PROSTEP ITS GmbH, Hein-Sass-Weg 19, 21129 Hamburg, Germany e-mail: Matthias.Grau@prostep.com D. Mun Advanced Transportation System Research Division, Maritime & Ocean Engineering Research Institute, KORDI, 171 Jang-dong, Yuseong-Gu, Daejeon 305-343, Republic of Korea e-mail: dhmun@moeri.re.kr