Welcome at IFIP WG 5.1 Home page

Understanding the whole life-cycle impact of products is a critical issue in product development today. The interaction of products with the environment is recognized as of enormous importance for the sustainability of future economic development while understanding of the life-cycle costs of products (the total costs of ownership) and their interaction with users is vital as company portfolios move toward product-service systems (PSS) and services assume greater importance in economic life. These pressures imply the need for new approaches to product development that take account of the increased importance of life-cycle issues, and for support systems that allow the information and data associated with products to be developed and sustained through the product life-cycle.

Product development for the whole life-cycle implies a number of different but complementary tools, environments and methodologies. The importance of the topic is so great that is has been addressed from a large number of scientific and managerial perspectives (including product and logistics support, supply chain and value mapping considerations, eco-design, eco-innovation, design for disassembly, design for maintainability, support engineering, end-of-life perspectives, etc…). We concentrate here on the engineering and systems support aspects of the issues for which the term product life-cycle engineering (PLE) applies.

PLE is an integrated approach to manage the creation and dissemination of product engineering data throughout the project structure. It is an emerging and evolving field of research in academia with potentially strong impact on industry practice. Today, challenges faced by product development teams include globalization, outsourcing, mass customization, fast product development and product traceability. These challenges enhance the need for collaborating environments and knowledge management along the product lifecycle stages. PLE approaches are gaining acceptance for managing all information about the corporation’s products throughout their full lifecycle, from conceptualization to operations and disposal. The PLE philosophy and systems aim at providing support to an even broader range of engineering and business activities.

Product Lifecycle Engineering and one of its foundations, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) are emerging as major concerns for most organizations (be it discrete goods manufacture or process industries) and a major opportunity for those involved in integrating diverse tools used in each task domain or stage of product development and beyond. It can be argued that technology exists today for the creation of a seamless environment for accessing, manipulating and reasoning about product information that is being produced in fragmented and distributed environments.

Working Group 5.1 (WG 5.1) brings together researchers, developers, and users in product development for the whole life-cycle.

Via the WG activities, the International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management (IJPLM) (the Editor in Chief and the Associate Editors will be members of the WG), the international Product Lifecycle Management conference (PLM) (the WG includes some of the past co-chairmen and organizers, program co-chairs and International Program committee (IPC) members of this conference), and the involvement of all stakeholders, we hope to shape the future of this new field and advance the science and practice of enterprise systems development.

In particular, the IJPLM is a unique international journal strictly dedicated to the research in this field and provides an authoritative source of information and is devoted to the development, promotion and coordination of the science and practice of the field.

The PLM conference will be organized under the WG5.1 but it is proposed that the PLM conference will have the official support of the TC5. Contributions (papers, special sessions…) from other TC5 Working Groups will be encouraged.

The topics of the WG will concern all aspects of Product Development for the whole life-cycle, including rapid product development and concept validation, CAD tools for early design, collaborative product development, capture and reuse of design information, feedbacks from supply chain, usage and product recycle management, etc.

These topics are of interest to numerous people, both academic and industrial:

• Academics and researchers working in the different fields of Product Development and Product Lifecycle Engineering
• Academics and researchers working on Collaborative Product Technologies
• R&D, design, engineering and technical professionals and managers
• New product design and development professionals, managers and technical operations executives
• Business executives, key decision makers and new business developers
• National and regional economic development agencies

To draw up the prospects for research in this field, WG 5.1 aims to identify appropriate visions and strategies, in order to propose solutions to successfully plan, implement and use the corresponding systems and practices. The WG aims to contribute to a wide-scale dissemination of sustainable product development knowledge, and works that seek to develop and apply pragmatic and advanced solutions for deploying collaborative processes of value creation and delivery within the product development process. It will also establish channels of communication between experts in academic and research institutions, practitioners and professionals working in industry and related business, and policy makers.