A case study for a unified designation of development information in a PDM System for Technical Inheritance

Industry 4.0 is the next step to autonomous products, productions and processes, which have the ability to collect information about themselves and their environment and to communicate with each other. The information about the products is analyzed and verified to develop a new product generation, what is called Technical Inheritance. The information about the product are saved in databases, which storage the information but do not structure them. For a unified designation and organization in the development phase Product Data Management (PDM) systems are used. The following paper presents a numbering system, which ensures a unified designation for the Technical Inheritance. Shown on a sorting system for object carriers in a medical environment the numbering system demonstrates, how the Technical Inheritance is implemented and traceable in a PDM system.