Authoring tools and management information systems: study of a generalizable architecture

The need to effectively manage the documentation covering the entire production process, from the concept phase right through to market realise, constitutes a key issue in the creation of a successful and highly competitive product. For almost forty years the most commonly used strategies to achieve this have followed Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) guidelines. Translated into information management systems at the end of the '90s, this methodology is now widely used by companies operating all over the world in many different sectors. PLM systems and editor programs are the two principal types of software applications used by companies for their process aotomation. Editor programs allow to store in documents the information related to the production chain, while the PLM system stores and shares this information so that it can be used within the company and made it available to partners. Different software tools, which capture and store documents and information automatically in the PLM system, have been developed in recent years. One of them is the ''DirectPLM'' application, which has been developed by the Italian company ''Focus PLM''. It is designed to ensure interoperability between many editors and the Aras Innovator PLM system. In this dissertation we present ''DirectPLM2'', a new version of the previous software application DirectPLM. It has been designed and developed as prototype during the internship by Focus PLM. Its new implementation separates the abstract logic of business from the real commands implementation, previously strongly dependent on Aras Innovator. Thanks to its new design, Focus PLM can easily develop different versions of DirectPLM2, each one devised for a specific PLM system. In fact, the company can focus the development effort only on a specific set of software components which provides specialized functions interacting with that particular PLM system. This allows shorter Time-To-Market and gives the company a significant competitive advantage.

Design and specification of a modular automatic testing solution

Electric vehicles and electronic components inside the vehicle are becoming increasingly important. The software as well starts to have a significant impact on modern high-end cars therefore a careful validation process needs to be implemented with the aim of having a bug free product when it is released. The software complexity increases and thus also the testing phases is more demanding. Test can be troublesome and, in some cases, boring and easy. The intelligence can be moved in test definition and writing rather than on test execution. The aim of this document is to start the definition of an automatic modular testing system capable to execute test cycles on systems that interacts with the CAN networks and with DUT that can be touched with a robotic arm. The document defines a first version of the system, in particular the hardware interface part with the aim of taking logs and execute test in an automated fashion with the test engineer can have a higher focus on the test definition and analysis rather than execution.