The " PLM (Product Life Cycle Management) of the Future " chair signed between Arts et Métiers laboratories Lispen and LCPI) and Capgemini is celebrating its first anniversary. This is an opportunity to review the work in progress in the areas of research, technology transfer, and training.
The chair aims to address the challenges of industrial digital transformation by drawing on the convergence of the physical and digital worlds throughout a product's life cycle, from specifications to end of life. Bringing together digital specialists and PLM experts is essential for modeling the industry of the future.
Developing innovative research through a cognitive and semantic approach
This six-year chair will enable innovative research to be carried out in the field of product lifecycle management methods and tools. To date, two theses have contributed to this work.
Optimizing the use of heterogeneous data
At Lispen, on the Aix-en-Provence campus, Lise Kim has begun work on a thesis addressing issues faced by the industrial company Capgemini. Her work focuses on exploring data from the manufacturing industry with a view to optimizing its use.
Lise Kim explains "16% of an employee's average time at work is spent searching for information. Data is constantly growing, heterogeneous, implicitly linked, and distributed. Access to information is therefore a major challenge."
How can you obtain effective information on demand?
Lise Kim's approach to answering this question is to use graph technologies to perform fast, relevant, and comprehensive information searches.
The first challenge is to build a graph capable of representing all of the company's heterogeneous data, taking into account the syntactic diversity of the data.
The second is to produce a knowledge graph that allows the search to be extended to related semantic terms.
To learn more about the challenges and proposed solutions currently being implemented: presentation of Lise Kim's thesis "How to use graphs for information retrieval in the manufacturing industry?"
Demonstrate the relevance of a cognitive approach in the design of augmented design environments
On the Paris campus, Armand Huet has joined the LCPI laboratory. His thesis work aims to develop a design assistant to structure knowledge on product design rules subject to legal regulations and technical constraints in the industry.
"Applying design rules for drawings or models is no easy task due to their number and the variety of fields they cover," explains Armand.
Existing tools require direct user intervention, which slows down the design process. They cannot handle all types of design rules. A new tool is needed to transparently apply and optimize these rules in line with the needs of the manufacturing industry.
The originality of the approach lies in the situation in which the designer will be placed. One screen is used for design and the other for searching for design rules. "This experiment allows us to measure the impact of our assistant on various parameters such as total design time, the number of design rules successfully applied, and the cognitive load on the user," concludes Armand Huet.
Train industry employees in PLM
Digital transformation is giving rise to new professions and new ways of working and learning.
" Preparing for the future by providing in-house training for manufacturing employees on new approaches to product lifecycle management and digital mock-ups is also the objective of the "PLM of the Future" chair ," says Frédéric Segonds, senior lecturer at LCPI (Paris campus) and co-head of the chair with Philippe Véron, professor at Lispen (Aix-en-Provence campus).
This initiative brings together eight Arts et Métiers teachers across three campuses, delivering approximately 40 hours of classes per session. To date, five sessions have been completed, with around 60 staff members trained in PLM core skills. These courses are offered by Ecole by Capgemini, within the 3DExperience program in collaboration with Dassault Systèmes. They are available to employees who submit a formal request.
More information
Contacts: Philippe Véron and Frédéric Segonds, co-directors of the "PLM of the Future" chair
