A COMMENT ON STANDISH ET-AL - THE PROBLEM WITH CALS - BARRIERS TO THEDEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCT DATA EXCHANGE AND THE US CONTINUOUS ACQUISITION AND LIFE-CYCLE SUPPORT PROGRAM

Product data exchange (PDE) offers the prospect of electronically tran sferring design and manufacturing data between companies. The US GALS programme is the most prominent of several initiatives with this aim. A major barrier to the use of PDE is the lack of widely used standards specifying the nature of the data to be exchanged and the structure o f the messages to be used. This is often portrayed as a largely techni cal matter, but in practice there are major social barriers to the sta ndardisation process. First, such standardisation is necessarily polit ical, both in the sense of governments having competing interests, as well as in the differing requirements of military and civil users and of different industrial sectors. Second, at the heart of GALS is the c oncept of concurrent engineering, in which the emphasis on data sharin g threatens existing hierarchical inter-organisational relationships a nd the retention of proprietary knowledge. Third, the complex nature o f the data to be exchanged will in many cases require the companies to change their internal systems to be compatible with the standards, an d this again constitutes a barrier to the use of such standards.