Marco Grimm

Intellectual Property Protection and Secure Knowledge Management in Collaborative Systems Engineering

Abstract Developing complex systems with the Systems Engineering approach requires a close collaboration between engineers. Today, this collaboration is often globalized and performed beyond enterprise boundaries. In order to maximize the engineering outcome and manageability, it is necessary to share and transfer engineering knowledge and intellectual property in a digital form. Knowledge is valuable and easy to copy hence it is often subject to intended theft or loss. This leads to substantial economic damages worldwide due to product piracy and plagiarism. The goal conflict between a wide availability of knowledge to system engineers and a secure management and usage of intellectual property is still unsolved. Legal and organizational measures, such as nondisclosure agreements and facility surveillance, are insufficient to solve the problem alone. Therefore industrial companies demand for new measures that effectively protect their intellectual property. This paper presents an analysis of current technical approaches that are applicable on securing knowledge in collaborative Systems Engineering. It shows that all approaches do not sufficiently cover the industrys knowledge security requirements. Hence a new knowledge security concept is introduced. It covers the specific requirements and constraints in the Systems Engineering context and provides a knowledge security improvement over the current technical approaches.

Analysis of Enterprise Rights Management Solutions for CAD Data According to the Requirements of the Automotive Industry and a Proposal to Increase the ERM Security Level

The use of computer aided design (CAD) for product development is well-established. Without this technology, it would be impossible to maintain the speed and quality of products in the collaborative product development process. When CAD technology was first introduced, it was only possible to include simple geometrical elements to represent the product in the CAD system. With the evolution of CAD systems much more information was added to the CAD files such as: model history, manufacturing information, material and others. With this information a lot of intellectual property is saved inside the CAD files. If, on one hand, the integration of the intellectual property to CAD data speeds up the product development, and makes it possible to integrate the different areas of the companies like development and manufacturing; on the other hand, this leads to general danger for the companies, because the CAD data must be shared inside and outside of the company. Nowadays, in most companies which are exchanging data, the security is just kept by contracts, laws and technical mechanisms that do not guarantee the security of the data being exchanged. As soon as the data crosses the border of the company there is no way to control the data anymore. One way to guarantee the security of the data exchanged is to ensure that only authorized people, no matter where they are located, can access distributed data. This is provided by Enterprise Rights Management (ERM), which protects the data as soon as it is created. ERM technology controls digital data, even after it has crossed the borders of the company. The owner of the data to be shared can control its rights by several approvals that can be granted or denied, e.g. who is allowed to work with the data, how long it can be accessed, which actions can be performed, and others. This paper analyzes two of the current ERM solutions for protecting CAD data according to the requirements of the automotive industry. It shows, that the analyzed ERM systems are protecting CAD data only on a file-based level and do not provide granular protection which is necessary to meet the automotive industry’s requirements. In order to furthermore increase security of CAD data, this paper also presents a proposal which extends the current file-based protection to a granular protection.Copyright

Distributed Additive Manufacturing: Concept for the Application of JT (ISO 14306) as Downstream Process Format

Additive manufacturing is gaining new impetus due to decreasing costs for additive manufacturing machines and materials, and the continuous improvement of additive manufacturing technology itself. The integration of modern internet technologies paves the way for a globally distributed additive manufacturing, but recently used data formats fall short to offer consistent solutions to address current and future requirements for efficient distributed additive manufacturing. The integration of the standardized 3D data format JT (ISO 14306) in distributed additive manufacturing enables the deployment of additive manufacturing processes based on open standards with a suitable integration in established engineering applications. Different geometry representations, integration of meta data, harmonization with other standardized data formats like STEP and the prevalence in industry lead to the usage of one standardized 3D data format for all engineering downstream processes. In this paper, two approaches for the integration of JT based on automated conversion and JT based slicing and tool path generation are introduced and validated. The utilization of web services enables the controlling and monitoring of additive manufacturing processes on mobile devices, independent of the location, for an efficient collaboration on a global scale.Copyright