Web Services to Product, Processes and Resources Data Integration: Results and Perspectives of FedMan Project

Abstract

A production system can be treated at various levels beginning on components and going on machinery, plant, factory and even company. As for each level there are specific IT tools, every level necessarily implies an increase of the amount of data to be managed. To accomplish this integration of multiple sources the FedMan project uses the concept of federative databases and organizes this data in a model with three orthogonal domains: Product, Processes and Resources. The integration is based on a service-oriented architecture, which provides the access to specific information via web services requesting to the owner of information. This federative approach treats the data encapsulated in order to keep the partial autonomy of specific tools, without significant loss of flexibility. This model of integration is promising in the sense of integrating large amounts of data involved in a production system, maintaining the flexibility of each information technology tool.