PDM Project Management System For Engineering Design Institute

Product Data Management (PDM) is a tool that helps people to manage both product data and the product development process. PDM systems keep track of the masses of data and information required to design, manufacture or build, and then support and maintains products . Project management is one area of a PDM system. It is used to support project work and carry out the project, utilizing process, schedule and organization modeling functionalities. It should also be used for project planning, visualization and reporting tasks.Engineering design institutes are eager for a good PDM project management system. But most of the PDM project management systems are not as good as expected currently. The reasons vary from one to another. This article tries to resolve the problem from the view of software development, and it emphasizes system software architecture, system model and critical technologies of a PDM project management system.Most of the current PDM project management systems are based on C/S architecture, which are obsolete, lack of flexibility and highly costing to implement; while in the time of Web, PDM project management system itself is in evolution, therefore, the old architecture cannot meet the demands any more. Software architecture, which researchers are dedicating to, is considered as a new solution to software development. This article introduces the J2EE architecture, which is regarded as best architecture nowadays and this article employees an enhanced EJB + struts framework as the system framework.This article proposes a new system model for PDM project management system. The model is based on workflow and process management, depending on project planning, emphasizing task scheduling and manpower management, and covering technology management. In this model, the most import thing is to handle the relations between plans, tasks and users. This article uses project network diagrams to represent project schedule plans. Tasks are determined by plans. Users are not only system users, but also are system resources.This article also introduces critical technologies of PDM Project management system. These technologies include task splitting, task assigning, project network optimizing, task schedule and web based distributed file server.Finally, this article shows the implement of this project management system in engineering design institutes.