Keywords
lifecycle management
MBSE
PLM
CAD/CAE
Digital Thread
Digital Twin
variant and configuration management
How to Cite
Abstract
The tension between standardisation and flexibility is one of the key challenges of modern industrial product development, especially in the context of AI based System of Systems Lifecycle Management (SoS LM) and Digital Threads. While standardisation creates efficiency, transparency and process reliability, flexibility is crucial for enabling innovation and adaptability. This paper examines how organisations can reconcile both principles without losing the advantages of either. Standardisation forms the backbone for consistent data flows, interoperability and quality management. It creates common structures, promotes reusability and ensures global collaboration. Nevertheless, excessive standardisation can lead to rigid processes that inhibit innovation and learning. Flexibility, on the other hand, opens up scope for action to respond to new requirements, technologies and markets. It manifests itself in modular system architectures, adaptable workflows and decentralised decision making structures. Companies that design their processes to be adaptive respond more quickly to change and increase their speed of innovation. But here, too, there are risks: too much freedom can lead to inconsistencies, data chaos and a lack of governance. The central concern of this work is to show ways in which standardisation and flexibility can be understood not as opposites, but as complementary variables. The balance is achieved through modular process building blocks, adaptive workflows and ‘bound flexibility’ i.e. freedom within clear boundaries. In addition to technological expertise, the implementation of such hybrid systems requires, above all, an open corporate culture that promotes both compliance with rules and creative thinking. In this way, the AI based SoS lifecycle management approach becomes an adaptive, dynamic system that is equally focused on efficiency and innovation. The goal is to achieve a balance in which standardisation serves as the foundation and flexibility as the engine of further development a balancing act that will become a decisive competitive factor in the digitalised industry in the future.
References
E. Subrahmanian et al., “The Role of Standards in Product Lifecycle Management Support Systems,” NIST Interagency Report 7289, 2006.
D. A. McKendry and R. I. Whitfield, “Process considerations for Product Lifecycle Management implementation for high value Engineering to Order programmes,” Design Science, vol. 8, 2022.
V. Merminod et al., “How does PLM technology support knowledge transfer and flexibility in New Product Development?,” J. Manuf. Tech. Mgmt., vol. 23, no. 7, 2012.
L. Gzara and N. Martin, “Workflow flexibility in PLM Systems: State of art and proposition of a generic approach,” Int. Conf. PLM, 2005.
W. M. P. van der Aalst, M. Pesic and H. Schonenberg, “Declarative workflows: Balancing between flexibility and support,” Computers in Industry, vol. 61, 2009.
C. J. J. Paredis et al., “Modularization as a system life cycle management strategy,” Systems Engineering, vol. 22, no. 1, 2019.
H. Habib et al., “Managing Engineering Change within the Paradigm of Product Lifecycle Management,” Processes, vol. 10, no. 9, 2022.
A. Schultheis et al., “Towards Flexible Control of Production Processes: A Requirements Analysis for Adaptive Workflow Management,” Processes, vol. 12, 2024.
N. Peñaranda, R. Mejía Gutiérrez, D. Romero and A. Molina, “Implementation of Product Lifecycle Management Tools using Enterprise Integration Engineering,” Int. J. CIM, vol. 23, no. 7, 2010.
D. A. G. Bergsjö, Product Lifecycle Management Architectural and Organisational Perspectives, PhD Thesis, Chalmers Univ., 2009.
D. Penciuc et al., “PLM approach for integration of engineering design and life cycle engineering,” AI EDAM, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016.
A. Saad et al., “Product lifecycle management as a sustainable approach in the cottage industry,” J. Manuf. Syst., 2024.
X. Ji et al., “Challenges and Opportunities in Product Life Cycle Management under Industry 4.0,” Int. J. Prod. Res., vol. 61, 2023.
P. G. Maropoulos, “Design verification and validation in product lifecycle,” Computers Ind. Eng., vol. 58, 2010.
J. Nilsson and A. Lagerstedt, “Flexibility in Product Lifecycle Management: A Case Study,” Int. J. Prod. Dev., 2017.
R. Shankar and P. Thomke, “Balancing standardization and innovation in engineering design,” MIT Sloan Management Review, 2018.
C. Baines and A. Lightfoot, “Agile Product Lifecycle Management: Integrating Standardization and Adaptivity,” IEEE Eng. Mgmt. Rev., vol. 48, no. 2, 2020.
M. Eigner and R. Stark, Product Lifecycle Management Integration of Technologies and Business Processes, Springer, 2015.
B. J. Hicks, “Lean information management: Understanding and eliminating waste,” Int. J. Inf. Mgmt., vol. 27, 2007.
T. Gao and W. Wang, “Adaptive workflow control for collaborative PLM environments,” IEEE Trans. Eng. Mgmt., vol. 64, no. 3, 2017.
C. E. McMahon and L. Zhang, “Standardization in PLM Data Exchange,” Proc. Int. Conf. PLM, 2019.
K. Chandrasegaran et al., “The Evolution, Challenges, and Future of Knowledge Representation in Product Design Systems,” Computer Aided Design, vol. 45, 2013.
A. Grieves, Product Lifecycle Management: Driving the Next Generation of Lean Thinking, McGraw Hill, 2016.
A. Stetter and B. Lindemann, “Holistic Lifecycle Modelling of Complex Systems,” Design Science, 2018.
N. Chungoora et al., “Toward ontologies for formalizing PLM information,” Computers in Industry, vol. 64, 2013.
S. Terzi et al., “PLM: The Need for a New Perspective,” Int. J. Prod. Res., vol. 48, no. 11, 2010.
H. D. Rex and K. Zelm, “Process integration and flexibility in collaborative engineering,” CIRP Annals, vol. 69, no. 1, 2020.
G. Wynn and R. Clarkson, “Governance and Change Management in PLM Environments,” IEEE Trans. Eng. Mgmt., vol. 65, 2018.
L. Monica and A. Lanza, “Cultural factors in PLM adoption,” AI EDAM, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019.
T. Birkhofer et al., PLM in der Praxis: Methoden und Werkzeuge, Hanser, 2017.
A. Kusiak, “Concurrent engineering: automation, tools, and techniques,” Wiley IEEE Press, 2013.
R. Sacks et al., “Lean and BIM for integrated project delivery,” Wiley, 2018.
S. Boucher et al., “Balancing flexibility and control in engineering organizations,” IEEE Eng. Mgmt. Rev., vol. 47, no. 4, 2019.
H. Kim et al., “Knowledge based PLM for adaptive product development,” J. Comput. Inf. Sci. Eng., vol. 19, 2019.
S. Cheng and R. Shen, “A hybrid approach to PLM workflow optimization,” Computers Ind. Eng., vol. 151, 2021.
R. Segonds et al., “Integrating design change management and PLM,” Comput. Aided Design Applications, vol. 17, 2020.
Y. Xu et al., “Digital twin driven adaptive product lifecycle,” IEEE Access, vol. 9, 2021.
Z. Chen and K. Xu, “Information architecture for flexible PLM ecosystems,” Int. J. Prod. Res., 2022.
P. E. Love and A. Irani, “From concurrent engineering to PLM: A review,” IEEE Trans. Eng. Mgmt., vol. 56, no. 3, 2009.
Salehi, V. (2024). Application of Munich Agile Concept for MBSE for a holistic approach to collect vehicle data based on board diagnostic system. In Proceedings of the 44th Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (CIE) (Vol. 2B). https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2024-141089
Salehi, V. (2023). Application of Munich Agile Concept for MBSE based development of automated guided robot based on digital twin data. In Proceedings of the 43rd Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (CIE) (Vol. 2). https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2023-110983
Salehi, V. (2021). Application of a holistic approach of hydrogen internal combustion engine (HICE) buses. In Proceedings of the Design Society. https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2021.48
Salehi, V., Wang, S. (2021). Application of Munich agile concepts for MBSE as a holistic and systematic design of urban air mobility in case of design of vertiports and vertistops. In Proceedings of the Design Society. https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2021.50
Salehi, V. (2021). Integration of blockchain technology in systems engineering and software engineering in an industrial context. In Proceedings of the Design Society. https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2021.450
Salehi, V., Taha, J., Wang, S. (2020). Application of Munich Agile Concept for MBSE by means of automated valet parking functions and the 3D environment data. In Proceedings of the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference. https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2020-22040
Salehi, V., Wang, S. (2019). Munich Agile MBSE concept (MAGIC). In Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED). https://doi.org/10.1017/dsi.2019.377
Salehi, V. (2019). Development of an agile concept for MBSE for future digital products through the entire System of Systems Lifecycle management called Munich Agile MBSE Concept (MAGIC). Computer Aided Design and Applications, 17(1), 147-166. https://doi.org/10.14733/cadaps.2020.147-166
Taha, J., Salehi, V. (2018). Development of a low powered wireless IoT sensor network based on MBSE. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/SysEng.2018.8544420
Salehi, V., Groß, F., Taha, J. (2018). Implementation of systems modelling language (SysML) in consideration of the CONSENS approach. In Proceedings of the International Design Conference (DESIGN). https://doi.org/10.21278/idc.2018.0146
Salehi, V., Wang, S. (2018). Web based visualisation of 3D factory layout from hybrid modelling of CAD and point cloud. Computer Aided Design and Applications, 16(2), 243-255. https://doi.org/10.14733/cadaps.2019.243-255
Salehi, V., Wang, S. (2017). Using point cloud technology for process simulation in digital factory. In Proceedings of the ICED Conference. https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/2220-4342
Salehi, V., McMahon, C. (2016). Identification of factors during the introduction and implementation of PLM methods and systems in an industrial context. In IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology (AICT). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33111-9_35
Salehi, V., Burseg, L. (2016). System driven product development (SDPD) for mechatronic systems. In IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology (AICT). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33111-9_66
Salehi, V., McMahon, C. (2011). Development and application of an integrated approach for parametric associative CAD design in an industrial context. Computer Aided Design and Applications, 8(2), 225-236. https://doi.org/10.3722/cadaps.2011.225-236
Salehi, V., McMahon, C. (2011). Development of an evaluation framework for implementation of parametric associative methods in an industrial context. In Proceedings of the ICED 11 Conference.
Salehi, V., McMahon, C. (2009). Methodological integration of parametric associative CAD systems in PLM environment. In Proceedings of the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference (DETC2009). https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2009-86583
Salehi, V., McMahon, C. (2009). Action research into parametric associative CAD systems in an industrial context. In Proceedings of the ICED 09 Conference.
Salehi, V., McMahon, C. (2009). Development of a generic integrated approach for parametric associative CAD systems. In Proceedings of the ICED 09 Conference.
Salehi, V., McMahon, C. (2011). An integrated approach to parametric associative design for powertrain components in the automotive industry. Action Research. Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (VDI Bayern).
Salehi, V. (2012). An integrated approach to parametric associative design for powertrain components on the automotive industry. University of Bath.
Salehi, V. (2015). Development and Application of an Integrated Approach to CAD Design in an Industrial Context. In Impact of Design Research on Industrial Practice: Tools, Technology, and Training.
Salehi, V., Schade, D., Taha, J. (2015). Application of SysML in the research field of definition of the environment model for autonomous driving simulation. In Proceedings of the Design Society Conference 2015.
Salehi, V. (2025). Integration of Munich Agile Concept for MBSE in an Industrial Context for Future Centralized Car Server Architectures. In Proceedings of the ICIEA EU Conference, Munich University of Applied Sciences, Germany.
Salehi, V. (2025). A Holistic and Systematic Approach for Generation of Synthetic Data Sets from CAD Data Related CNC Production Environment. In Proceedings of the ICIEA EU Conference, Munich University of Applied Sciences, Germany.
Salehi, V. (2025). Development of a Parametric Holistic CAD Design for Virtual Urban Air Mobility Concepts. In Proceedings of the ICIEA EU Conference, Munich University of Applied Sciences, Germany.
Salehi, V. (2025). Application of Blockchain in case of Engineering Data Processes and Product Lifecycle Management System. In Journal of Intelligent System of Systems Lifecycle Management. https://doi.org/10.71015/dm8rgj08
Salehi, V. (2025). Application of Systems Engineering in context of building 3D Environment for Autonomous Vehicle Systems in an industrial context for Central Car Computing. In Journal of Intelligent System of Systems Lifecycle Management. https://doi.org/10.71015/qgdjwx03
Salehi, V., Witte, M., Loos, M. (2025). Integration of Vehicle Data File based on Blockchain Technologie in an industrial context. In Journal of Intelligent System of Systems Lifecycle Management. https://doi.org/10.71015/yxkfke75
Salehi, V. (2015). An integrated approach for Sytem Driven Product Development (SDPD) by means of development of a mechatronic systems in an industrial context. ARC Conference.
Salehi, V. (2015). System Driven Product Development (SDPD) by Means of Development of a Mechatronic Systems in an Industrial Context. IFIP Conference.