Reliability of Design Data Through Provenance Management

In today's virtual product development, huge amounts of data are shared and exchanged between a large number of experts in collaborative and highly complex design tasks. While in these processes designers are oftentimes workingwith data, which were not created by themselves, they aremissing knowledge and transparency about the origin and reliability of the data source. Approaching this problem, we identified the necessity of a responsible and transparent generation and usage of design data. Therefore, we developed a concept, which tracks and stores the historical record of a data item and its modifications in order to identify and evaluate the source of the data item. The concept proposes a novel provenance model, which consists of a provenance graph, design criteria and evaluation criteria. To validate the concept, a prototypical implementation was conducted and evaluated. We came to the conclusion, that the presented concept can be used effectively to model and evaluate the historical record of a data set in the virtual product development in order to create a transparent and reliable use and generation of design data.