Product information systems engineering: an approach for building product models by reuse of patterns

This paper deals with an approach for Product Information Systems (PIS) engineering by reuse of patterns. Patterns form generic solutions to problems frequently occurring during PIS specification and implementation. The pattern approach provides an engineering guide to model data by organizing hierarchically and functionally modeling problems and the manner to resolve them. Their use would contribute to accelerate building and implementing product and process models during PIS specification and implementation. Two kind of patterns are distinguished: business patterns used for specification and providing solutions for application field problems and software patterns used for implementation and providing solutions for technical problems (software). A special interest is given to identify and specify different business patterns for product modeling during PIS specification. However, a pattern-based approach can be developed only for disciplines which acquired a certain maturity, i.e. those for which there is both a consensus around a finite set of problems and a variety of known solutions for solving these problems. There is no universal agreement on the knowledge needed in product information systems, let alone on the representation of this knowledge and we therefore find it impossible to discuss product information systems without reference to what kind of knowledge is being managed. The first step consisted thus of constructing a general reference framework based on PIS concepts, providing a common terminology and a semantic of the principal concepts managed in PIS and proposing various models to fix these concepts. It forms a basis for exploring the problems frequently occurring during PIS specification. A pattern language is thus defined to resolve the identified problems, basing partially on existing design pattern catalogues. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.