Autor: Christian Mosch

Due to shorter product life cycle and increasing variants of products manufacturing companies have to be flexible in factory structures. Flexibility of factory structures is based on defined factory planning processes considering product, process and resource data resulting from various disciplines and isolated IT tools. Thus factory planning processes can be characterized as iterative, interdisciplinary and participative pro-cesses. To enforce the interdisciplinary and participative character, a federative factory data management (FFDM) as an integrative solution will be described. Product, process and resource data will be provided by web services resulting in acceleration of factory planning pro-cesses due to reduced redundancy, inhomogeneity and inconsistence in data holding.

IT tools currently available in the context of digital factory allow to develop and to analyze factory concepts on different levels of abstraction. One challenge is the complexity of factory planning processes. These factory planning processes can be described with an interdisciplinary, participative and iterative character. To handle these complex processes modern methods of concurrent and simultaneous engineering get more important. These methods require new challenges from IT resulting in isolated IT-tools of a digital factory. Integration of these isolated IT-tools is the common challenge and requires an integrative solution. In this paper the result of a study conducted by the Department of Computer Integrated Design (DiK) will be presented. The two main questions of the study are: The usage of tools of digital factory in the industry and the need for a factory data management as an integrative solution in industrial practice.