Effective manufacturing resource modelling

Information management in 21st century industry has many aspects that have to be fully understood and covered in an information plan. With the emergence of CAD, problems with version management became more profound. Product data management (PDM) systems offered a partial solution, but these systems do not cover complete product life cycle support across complete supply/demand chain networks and seldom address manufacturing resource and process modeling in an adequate manner. This paper discusses some trends and tools in manufacturing information management and product life cycle support, with a focus on reuse of existing production resource information throughout the product process resource domain