Integration of Product Design Process and Task Management for Product Data Management Systems

Product design is an evolving process which is characterized with creativity and uncertainty. The task management in this process is different from traditional ones because it involves more specific factors such as user specifications, product design specifications, reengineering, design process, and design data. In this article, we aim to analyze product design process with the viewpoint of project management and task management, and propose an integrated approach to interconnect those constraints, functional and nonfunctional factors coming from both product design and task management processes. In the presented approach, utilizing workflow technique, the design process and task management are directly and closely interconnected at process and data level by using the shared model and the shared database. Therefore, we can easily obtain the work breakdown structure (WBS) for project management. Implemented as part of PDM (Product data management) systems, the proposed method has been tested that it can facilitate the product