Collaborative production on the basis of object oriented software engineering principles

One of the main challenges for production enterprises is succeeding in the dynamic competitive environment with its rapidly changing requirements. A strategy for the individual factory to cope with these turbulent market and technological developments is to focus itself on a specific set of competencies and capacities and to offer these within the framework of temporary production networks which can be rapidly configured to meet changing requirements. Therefore, the individual factory must be able to integrate itself into temporary partnerships for changing production tasks but at the same time retain a stable basis for the efficient utilisation and sustainable development of its own capacity and competence. The developed object oriented explanation model is based on object oriented software engineering principles and describes an approach for the initial configuration and reconfiguration of factories within the framework of collaborative production networks.