Seamless co-operation of all partners in a project team is an essential demand of distributed engineering. One important challenge in this context is a shared access to a distributed product model. This can be achieved by offering a virtual PDM system that logically integrates the data of several physical PDM systems. This prevents the end user from searching and updating data sets in a variety of systems in parallel. This article discusses re-quirements to a PDM federation and presents a modular architecture to implement it in any given architecture.
