Federative factory data management an approach based upon service oriented architecture

The current situation in product development, production scheduling and factory design is characterized by collaborative engineering, participative factory design and fragmentation of value-added chains. According to this trend, new challenges are to meet around this field. From increasing use of multiple IT tools (creation, verification and information management systems) a distributed heterogeneous IT-landscape is growing which affects all processes and leads to financial risks. Regarding this, product development and factory design require a transparent and redundancy-free information flow in order to accomplish this complexity. A federative FDM (factory data management) provides a federation of PDM and FDM-systems as well as distributed applications. It builds a solid foundation for acquisition and propagation of factor-related data. It enables efficient integration and aggregation of data to support technical and economical decisions for downstream phases of factory planning and to overcome the prevailing deficits. The vision and approaches are described in this paper, based on SOA technology and on a reference information model as a common ontology to overcome the semantic and syntactic heterogeneities of all involved domain-specific applications and multiple systems in this surroundingfield.