The Information Systems and Manufacturing Processes Integration: Survey and Future Trends

Abstract

Today, enterprises have information technology that could fulfil their requirements in each operational phase and with external partners, e.g., suppliers. In fact, in industrial environment, many applications are available to support operating their Product Life Cycle stages. However, organizations typically acquire them aiming to solve focused needs, without an overall view of the global enterprise’s system integration. Therefore, problems arise when data exchange assumes crucial role in enterprise efficiency, and when coordination between several independent teams is the key factor to stay competitive in growing global market. This new kind of integrating “paradigm” is already under deployment by the research community and it is defined as Product Life Cycle Management (PLM). PLM has recently been recognized as a strategic approach in support of collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of product assets. Nevertheless, the advent of networked production environments has conducted to increase the number of heterogeneous systems that a manufacturer has to manage. Those needs have resulted in major semantic accuracy difficulties when exchanging and integrating information, even when standards guidelines are followed. A standard representation of the semantics associated with the product and processes, has been identified by the research community as a key to solve the problem. Ontologies provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between partners (which are two companies for example) and application systems. Therefore, they may play a major role in supporting information exchange processes in various areas, especially in manufacturing processes. This paper proposes a framework that integrates the available standard technology for product and process modelling, to render the manufacturing process and management interoperable at data and semantic level, envisaging a next generation of agile manufacturing networked organizations.