Preface : Product Lifecycle Management Enabling Smart X

Abstract

The year 2020 will go down in history as the year of the COVID-19 crisis. A global pandemic changed all our lives and restricted our freedom of movement. Eventually, industry was hit hard by lockdowns in many regions of the world. Closed factories, short-time work, and restricted border traffic led to broken supply and demand chains. Our traditional mode of operation could no longer be maintained. But then again, crisis has always been a driver for innovation. Many parts of our society had to react extremely fast to adopt their daily work to virtual collaboration. Education on every level went online within one or two weeks. Wherever possible, work was shifted to home office. Nobody would have thought that such radical changes in our work culture would be possible in such a short time. Yet, it was no coincidence that this was possible. Rather it was the result of continuous research and development during the last decades and particularly the efforts to foster digitalization throughout the last years. Since 2003, the IFIP WG 5.1 International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) brought together researchers, developers, and users of PLM. This event always aimed to integrate business approaches to the collaborative creation, management, and dissemination of product and process data throughout the extended enterprises that create, manufacture, and operate engineered products and systems. In this context, approaches such as digital and virtual product development, digital twins, smart manufacturing, or artificial intelligence were discussed and developed further. While these ideas seemed vague and visionary at the beginning, the contributions of this year's edition clearly showed that these novel concepts have reached a more mature level and have successfully been implemented in industry. Virtual collaboration, agile supply chains, smart manufacturing, and working interoperability have become vital. The development of PLM systems based on cloud and Web service technologies combined with Internet of Things (IoT) platforms seem to be key enablers of such intelligent or smart solutions for products, processes, and decisions. PLM enables smart X.