Data Management and Information Provisioning for Virtual Factories

Information management in today's digital factories shows a multitude of unconnected, heterogeneous information systems without effective integration of data except along a few standard processes. To successfully run the virtual factory, it is crucial to introduce a service-based information integration management that enables a flexible information provisioning

The real-time factory offers an intelligent, real-time operational management of factory processes and resources. It tightly integrates the real factory with the digital factory by continuously communicating, connecting and evaluating the factory's operational data. The shift to a real-time factory requires significant advances in the factory's information management and provisioning.

A Service Oriented Architecture enables the factory's information management to achieve a higher degree of flexibility and interoperability. Loosely-coupled services in a virtual manufacturing environment support flexible business process modeling methods by using service aggregation. Moreover, a SOA-based approach provides the required level of interoperability for the integration of the information systems needed for simulation, visualization and data analysis as used in the real-time factory.