Identifying PLM Themes, Trends and Clusters Through Ten Years of Scientific Publications

Abstract

Abstract. PLM encompasses a wide array of expertise, from designing green products to digital factories, with perspectives ranging from an IT standpoint to business strategies, encompassing products, processes and services. Hence, identifying the contours of PLM as a science through the themes, trends and clusters of its scientific literature is very challenging. At the same time, being able to portray PLM will benefit the PLM community, including researchers and practitioners, and should help foresee its future. This work examines PLM research bibliometric trends over the last ten years. We review the scientific literature published in English from 2005 to 2014 in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. Paper keywords are analyzed so as to identify trends and reveal the clusters of related themes based on the occurrences of words and the frequency of associations between them. Amongst the findings we observe that PLM coverage is both very large (2847 keywords being used over a decade) and very thin (2134 of these keywords appear only once in the decade). We also observe that the keyword showing the highest increase is Building Information Modeling (BIM).

Twenty Years of PLM – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

“…From their work, it can be concluded, that new topics such as BIM (building information modelling) or IoT (internet of things) are emerging. However, the later study also shows that the major topics mentioned by author keywords remain the same over the past 10 years [3].…”

“…Furthermore, it is important to better understand the values of PLM capabilities. These were as far as possible aligned with the keywords preferably chosen by other authors [3], but bundled into clusters which are explained in Table 2.…”

“…In contrast to other studies, that analyze the elapsed development of PLM by literature reviews [1], knowledge from research experts [2] or quantitative analysis of literature [3], [4], the aim of this study is to share our personal experience (consultants and researchers). With a set of case studies, we created a structured look back on PLM projects we know in depth: what was the nature of the customer and its product, what was the scope in terms of processes and organizations, which tools and technologies were involved and how well the targets were achieved.…”

Identifying PLM themes and clusters from a decade of research literature

“…The visualisation of communities of keywords reveals the structure of the domain better than just the count, degree or similar measures of keywords. In this paper, the PLM communities are revealed by filtering the network of keywords according to the weight of their network edges, rather than by filtering on the keywords' degrees, as done by Nyffenegger et al (2016). Hence, the PLM core cluster was obtained first by filtering data so as to show edges with a weight of 4 or more ( Figure 5), thus revealing the main research areas of PLM.…”

“…The keyword normalisation process is as explained in Nyffenegger et al (2016). This process includes steps such as:  American English is chosen over Britain English (e.g., 'modelling' is normalised to 'modeling', 'visualisation' to 'visualization', etc.…”