eCollaborative concurrent engineering and PLM services

The present paper describes how, in Concurrent Engineering and Networked Organisations context, Service Oriented Approaches dealing with Product Data Management could support e-Collaboration and interoperability, all along the Product Lifecycle Management phases, but also within the design phase where needs of the next phases are anticipated. After describing the current trends. a state of the art and drawbacks of previous solutions for industrial companies (aerospace, automotive), it introduces Framework Program 5 (FP5) IDEAS roadmap and Framework Program 6 (FP6) ATHENA Integrated Project (IP) European research projects. Then, it describes the Service Oriented Approach and existing proposals to defined standardised Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) services that could be a key component for collaborative workspace of networked organisations. Then some prototypes based on standardised Application Programming Interfaces are presented. Finally, from the lessons learnt, place of standardised PLM services to support interoperability as address by ATHENA is proposed.