Standardized architectures for information integration and life cycle management in the domain of production engineering

Sammanfattning: While design and management of production systems based on digital models brings benefits, the communication of models comes with challenges since models typically reside in a distributed heterogeneous IT environment using different syntax and semantics. Coping with heterogeneity requires an appropriate integration strategy and methodology. One main paradigm to integrate information and consequently IT-systems is to deploy standardized information models. In particular, ISO 10303 STEP has been endorsed as a suitable standard to exchange a wide variety of product manufacturing data. The representation and integration of product, process and production resources information using different STEP application protocols are well covered and extensively investigated by many researchers. However, the information representation and integration of logical relations of material flow such as product routing, and its integration with factory layout information has been less subject of research focuses. Hence, this thesis first contributes to identifying, describing and clarifying information requirements for an integrated representation of material flow logic and plant layout using the STEP standard.One the other hand, service-oriented IT-tool integration solutions are increasingly deployed for the data and tool interoperability, especially with the evolution of Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) whose focus is on the linking of data from heterogeneous software tools. OSLC focuses on the integration of the most common concepts across domains. Assuming a loosely coupled distributed architecture of IT-tools and services, OSLC adopts the Linked Data (LD) approach to ensure data consistency across the data sources. Thus the thesis studies the use of OSLC for tool integration and has found that it cannot be practiced independently for all types of integration in the production engineering domain. Therefore, in practice, there should be a combination of the standardized information and linked data approaches to facilitate the integration process. Thus, this thesis investigates the integration applicability of linked data and OSLC, the principles behind them, and criteria to identify where to use which approach. In addition, the thesis explores the synergy between the standardized information and linked data approaches and consequently suggests an approach based on a combination of these.Further, different computer applications in industrial cases were implemented to verify the suggested approaches. Finally the thesis is concluded with a discussion and suggestions for future work.