About Engineering Specifications

An Engineering Specification is a container designed to contain the parameters and the relations you create when working in a Product context or with Logical and Functional components.


  • Knowledge objects are inserted into Engineering Specifications associated with the product or the Logical and Functional component. These Engineering Specifications are stored as PLM entities.

  • Engineering Specifications are PLM entities created by you. You may decide to create one or several Engineering Specifications under the same Product/Logical/Functional component. Only one of these Engineering Specifications is considered as active. After creating the application data, it is added to the current active Engineering Specification.

  • Engineering Specifications can be heterogeneous in terms of included applicative data.
  • Each Engineering Specification can be loaded or not in CATIA (via VPM Navigator).
Important: By default, loading an Engineering Specification automatically loads its father product or Logical\Functional component. Therefore, you cannot load an isolated Engineering Specification.

  • User rights and lock capabilities can be granted/assigned to an Engineering Specification.
  • When loading a Product or a Logical\Functional component, Engineering Specifications are not loaded by default: You can identify the associated Engineering Specifications and decide to load them or not. This capability is available through the navigator user interface.
  • Knowledge objects usually make reference to other objects that may belong to the Product structure or to the Logical\Functional component, to other Engineering Specifications, or to Representations that belong to the Product structure or Logical\Functional representation. Thus, those references need to be stored in the database and navigated through the Navigator.
  • Be cautious when working with Engineering Specifications that have the same name: If you create a relation based on 2 reals that have the same name, the relation will detect a loop.

  • The following Knowledge features are supported:

    Infrastructure Knowledge Advisor Product Engineering Optimizer

    • Parameters
    • Parameters Sets
    • Formulas
    • Relations Sets
    • Laws
    • Inspector
    • Design Tables
    • Equivalent Dimensions
    • Rules
    • Checks
    • Sets of Equations
    • Reactions
    • Actions
    • Lists
    • VB Scripts
    • Optimizations
    • Designs of Experiments
    • Constraints Satisfactions

The solution coverage depends on the kind of information that can be referenced through Knowledgeware relations.

The following features can be referenced:


  • Representations parameters (or work package products parameters).
  • Representations publications of parameters.
  • Parameters that belong to other Engineering Specifications.
  • Offset parameters of constraints.

The following features cannot be referenced:


  • Kinematics mechanisms parameters.

  • Features in PLM Objects.

  • Objects that belong to other Engineering Specifications.