The collection of papers in this book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM'06) held at the Indian Institute of Science in the city of Bangalore, India during the 10-12th July 2006. The first two events in this conference series were held in Bangalore, India in 2003 and Lyon, France in 2005 respectively. The objective of this conference series is to bring together researchers and practitioners involved in product innovation, product development and product delivery together in one forum to share their viewpoints on new product innovation and lifecycle management.

The conference series was started when PLM as an area of research was seeking an identity and more importantly a community in academia. Defining the research agenda for PLM therefore remains an important goal of the conference. As we consider the papers this year with those in the last two events, the number of papers that describe research (as opposed to development) is showing a marked increase. It has been observed earlier that while tools and technologies that enable integration in each of the stages of design, development and delivery have been addressed, what PLM as a field must aim at is integration between these three stages as well with feedback from the ending stages of the current product lifecycle to the early stages of the next product lifecycle. It is encouraging to note that this book contains papers addressing the issues in the early stages and the end of the product lifecycle as well, indicating the emergence of research activity in these critical areas. It must be mentioned that industry has an important role to play in defining the research and development roadmap. The active participation by industry in the conference through all three editions has helped in extending the focus of research in PLM beyond product development and delivery into product definition and retirement.

A total of seventy papers were received. These were reviewed by the PLM'06 program committee and reviewers from around the world. Of these, twenty nine papers have been selected for plenary presentation and full paper publication in the proceedings. Another five papers were selected for presentation as industrial case studies. Papers presented at the conference cover the spectrum of topics from early stages issues such as portfolio management and innovation, knowledge management to business issues in the product lifecycle. Exchange of product information continues to be a dominant issue of interest judging by the number of papers in this area. An interesting development has been the increase in the number of papers addressing lifecycle issues in the context of cost and retirement indicating the importance academia and industry are beginning to place on this aspect.

On behalf of the conference co-chairs and our behalf, we thank all the authors, reviewers, organisations that participated in the product showcase, sponsors and the conference program committee for their help and support in putting this book together. We also wish to place on record and acknowledge the effort and assistance of Ajay Toppo, N. M. V. Rayappa and S. Raghu Menon in the preparation of this book and the CD-ROM proceedings.

Abdelaziz Bouras B. Gurumoorthy Soonhung Han (Editors)