Application Protocols for Standardising of Processes and Data in Digital Manufacturing

Abstract

To increase the efficiency of planning tasks the use of Digital Manufacturing (DM) software is state of the art for manufacturing companies in automotive and aerospace industries. Many of these companies deploy heterogeneous software environments often including many specialised but isolated IT-tools. In order to enable a continuous and reconfigurable planning workflow in DM the integration of planning tools and their data models will gain more and more importance. In this paper an approach for the integration of processes and data is introduced. Application-specific data models, so called Application Protocols, are used to standardise processes and data in DM and enable flexible software architecture. The methodology is validated by using the results in commercial software interfaces.