XML-based representations in product lifecycle management

To support a collaborative environment and strengthen information management for the entire Product Lifecycles Management (PLM) of products, there are increasing demands on developing new-generation product representations. The representations need to be of software platform independence, rapid sharing of information between geographically distributed applications and users, support of the entire product life cycle, and protection of commercial security of products. Conventional product representations, e.g., geometric or feature-based Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models, are unable to meet such requirements. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) offers several advantages, such as platform/application-independency, position-independency and machine-interpretability, so that it has the great potential to be incorporated with conventional product representations to form new-generation exchanging formats. This paper presents a survey of the XML-based product representations to support PLM.