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Integrated information and process management in manufacturing engineering

Objective

The basic objective of OPAL is to provide a concept for high-level integration of processes and information in the domain of engineering and production. The current level of integration is inadequate, because of the heterogeneity of information system components and data formats used to represent engineering information.

Many processes concerned with product development, product industrialisation, manufacturing and assembly are driven by heavy use of paper-based engineering information. As today's market becomes increasingly dynamic, internal information flows within companies are increasing, this paper-based handling and management of information processes is less able to meet these companies' needs. The integration requirements of these heterogeneous information and system environments have to be thoroughly studied, and concepts provided for a robust solution.
The information technology components important to all types of engineering information are the administration systems which are used to store and manage them, and to provide access to them. In industrial companies and co-operating networks of companies many different kinds of data administration systems occur, e.g. various kinds of databases, hierarchical, relational and object-oriented, product data management systems (PDMS) which may also be called engineering data management systems (EDMS).
The approach taken is OPAL is as much as possible to use existing methodologies and techniques to bring the right concepts together to provide a robust integration approach. Regarding integration, emerging vendor-independent concepts like DCE and CORBA are considered as a basis to implement an open architecture for integrated information and process management.
The OPAL open architecture will provide an umbrella, presenting information technology components to users and high-level business process applications in a unique way. A unifying set of information logistic services will be defined. Mechanisms will be provided for hypermedia access to engineering information, and to model and execute business processes related to the domains of developing, industrialising and manufacturing products. Results and technologies of past development efforts to be used as much as possible are:
- World Wide Web technology for hypermedia access and navigation
- Workflow management to define and operate integrated business processes.

Adapting these concepts to industrial needs and bringing them together with an architecture able to cope with the enormous industrial integration needs is the key objective of OPAL. Its aim is to enable a high-level integration of business applications, which will lead to a substantial increase in the efficiencies of business processes in the domains of developing, planning and manufacturing products.

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Funding Scheme

CSC - Cost-sharing contracts

Coordinator

Fatronik System
EU contribution
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Address
Poligono Ibaitarte 1
20870 Elgoibar
Spain

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Participants (10)

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Last update: 8 May 1996

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Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/20377

European Union, 2024