Advances in Sustainable and Competitive Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Enterprises operate in an increasingly turbulent environment. In order to stay competitive, more and more complex decisions have to be taken. Production systems are not relatively closed systems any more, but often part of supply networks with a high number of resulting interfaces. Planning and operation of factories are tightened together. At the same time virtual reality, as the mean of modern factory planning, merges with the real world. The processes of planning and operation are supported by a variety of software tools. With reference to operation of enterprises a lot of effort is put in integrating the different tools, while there is a deficit concerning the integration of factory planning tools. Therefore, the paper will look at the current state of interoperability in factory planning. The requirements and use cases of data exchange between tools for factory planning as well as other enterprise software, are discussed. Thereby, challenges and oppor- tunities resulting from better hardware performance, faster communication net- works and a wide range of new types of devices are listed. The consequences of trends like cloud computing and big data are classified. Conclusions are derived for possible architectures of software systems. The role of the Digital Factory in the whole development is investigated. 1