SMART-fm: INTEROPERABILITY FRAMEWORK FOR A SME-BASED INDUSTRIAL ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

The furniture sector in Europe involves mainly to small and medium enterprises that try to succeed day by day in a market that is becoming more and more competitive everyday. Each of these companies use different software to design, produce and sell their final product. A more competitive method of exchanging product data with higher quality and with low cost has been achieved inside IMS SMART-fm project (www.smart-fm.funstep.org), leading to the need for adoption of data standards involving partners from USA, Europe, Canada and Australia. This paper explains a framework that supports interoperability in distributed heterogeneous networked environments, assisting in the integration of reference models following dissimilar methodologies in the automatic mapping between ISO10303 STEP, UML and XML models.