Towards Support for Long-Term Digital Preservation in Product Life Cycle Management

Abstract

Important legal and economic motivations exist for the design and engineering industry to address and integrate digital long-term preservation into product life cycle management (PLM). Investigations revealed that it is not sufficient to archive only the product design data which is created in early PLM phases, but preservation is needed for data that is produced during the entire product lifecycle including early and late phases. Data that is relevant for preservation consists of requirements analysis documents, design rationale, data that reflects experiences during product operation and also metadata like social collaboration context. In addition, also the engineering environment itself that contains specific versions of all tools and services is a candidate for preservation. This paper takes a closer look at engineering preservation use case scenarios as well as PLM characteristics and workflows that are relevant for long-term preservation. Resulting requirements for a long-term preservation system lead to an OAIS (Open Archival Information System) based system architecture and a proposed preservation service interface that respects the needs of the engineering industry.

Digitization and Preservation of Cultural Heritage Products

“…Digital preservation is a common process in the manufacturing industry [3,6]. Recently, digital preservation became primordial in many sectors like: the medical field, historical and cultural fields, e-commerce, e-government, etc.…”

“…The initial approach to digital preservation was the OAIS system (Open Archival Information System) in the mid 90's. This model established a platform and a definition of initial best practices and concepts of digital preservation [6,7]. From this milestone, several research projects focused on digital preservation, like ERPANET which studied digital knowledge exchange, LOTAR which aimed at establishing long term preservation standards for digital data like 3D CAD models, and PDM (Product Data Management) [45].…”

State-of-the-art of long-term preservation in product lifecycle management

“…2) which is described in more detail in [21]. The information lifecycle management is the central SHAMAN approach to insure that existing data will be understood by future users and any services applied to the data will be executable by, and on, future technologies.…”

“…In [21] this information lifecycle is used to derive a highlevel system architecture (see Fig. 3) for embedding longterm preservation processes into PLM environments.…”

Digital fabrication and digital design

“…Adaptability to the new technology is a key concept here. As it is often discussed by researchers in the field of Product Life Cycle Management (Brunsmann, 2011;Brunsmann et al, 2012;Kota and Chakrabarti, 2014;Wilkes et al, 2009), technology has a smaller lifespan than ideas, the digital preservation of ideas and metadata within a product's lifecycle is a demanding task. Maybe within a decade certain software becomes obsolete, but the ideas that led to a project remain.…”