Recently, as the product life cycle becomes shorter and customer needs becomes various, the product development environment becomes complex. Therefore, it has a great difficulty in managing the information for product development without the information technology. So, during the product development, it is necessary to use the supporting tool of the product development for managing the product development information space efficiently.
The product development information space can be classified into three categories; Product, Process, and Organization (PPO). It is important to know each information schema of the PPO and their relations for managing the product development space, because they are generated and evolved during the lifecycle of product development.
To implement the efficient supporting tool of the product development, the good reference model for product development information space is needed. There are several product data management (PDM) tools for supporting the development environment. However, these have the weak points in supporting the management of each PPO and their relations.
In this paper, we describe the reference model for managing the product development information space and define graphical symbols to represent it. Also, implementing strategies such as the structured layer and the packet are proposed with the PPO relations, being classified into inter-relation and inner-relation.
