Autor: Reiner Anderl

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.

Modern enterprises are continuously advancing the IT-based realization of interconnected, world-wide engineering processes between customers, manufacturers, suppliers, and other engineering partners. But, available solutions are supporting this kind of enterprise and process integration as well as the integration of product data inadequately. Regarding this, at the Department of Computer Integrated Design (DiK), TU Darmstadt, appropriate solutions were developed. The derived solutions are enabling enterprises domain-independently to form effective virtual networks of organizations and to optimize processes of collaborative engineering. This can be done by simultaneously improving the magical triangle of time, costs and quality efficiently.

For an innovative and efficient product development process the use of modern parametric 3D-CAD systems is of increa-sing importance. Basically in the internal digital data structure of a 3D-CAD model geometrical and topological data as well as the modelling history is being stored. Additionally, the feature technology enables the models to be developed with the help of defined zones of geometry with embedded se-mantics. By means of the integration of geometrical and non-geometrical information into the 3D-CAD models it is possible to embed product specific knowledge and design know-how into the models. The department of Computer Integrated Design (DIK) is investigating methods and tools for developing, managing and reusing knowledge-based 3D-CAD-models.