Virtual engineering increases the rate of and diversity of models being created; hence requires maintenance in a product lifecycle management (PLM) system. This also induces the need to understand their creation contexts, known as historical or provenance information, to reuse the models in other engineering projects. PLM systems are specifically designed to manage product- and production-related data. However, they are less capable of handling the knowledge about the contexts of the models without an appropriate extension. Therefore, this research proposes an extension to PLM systems by designing a new information model to contain virtual models, their related data and knowledge generated from them through various engineering activities so that they can be effectively used to manage historical information related to all these virtual factory artifacts. Such an information model is designed to support a new Virtual Engineering ontology for capturing and representing virtual models and engineering activities, tightly integrated with an extended provenance model based on the W7 model. In addition, this paper presents how an application prototype, called Manage-Links, has been implemented with these extended PLM concepts and then used in several virtual manufacturing activities in an automotive company.

虚拟工程提高了创建模型的速度和多样性；因此需要对产品生命周期管理 (PLM) 系统进行维护。这也导致需要了解他们的创建上下文（称为历史或出处信息），以便在其他工程项目中重用模型。PLM 系统专门设计用于管理与产品和生产相关的数据。但是，如果没有适当的扩展，它们就无法处理有关模型上下文的知识。因此，本研究通过设计一个包含虚拟模型的新信息模型，提出了对 PLM 系统的扩展，它们通过各种工程活动从它们产生的相关数据和知识，以便它们可以有效地用于管理与所有这些虚拟工厂工件相关的历史信息。这种信息模型旨在支持新的虚拟工程本体，用于捕获和表示虚拟模型和工程活动，并与基于 W7 模型的扩展起源模型紧密集成。此外，本文还介绍了如何使用这些扩展的 PLM 概念实施称为 Manage-Links 的应用程序原型，然后将其用于汽车公司的多个虚拟制造活动中。与基于 W7 模型的扩展出处模型紧密集成。此外，本文还介绍了如何使用这些扩展的 PLM 概念实施称为 Manage-Links 的应用程序原型，然后将其用于汽车公司的多个虚拟制造活动中。与基于 W7 模型的扩展出处模型紧密集成。此外，本文还介绍了如何使用这些扩展的 PLM 概念实施称为 Manage-Links 的应用程序原型，然后将其用于汽车公司的多个虚拟制造活动中。