The project FedMan - “Federative Factory Data Management based on Service Oriented Architecture and Semantic Model Description on XML and RDF for Manufacturing Products” is a research project developed in partnership by the Technical University of Darmstadt, through the Computer Integrated Project Institute DiK, and by the Methodist University of Piracicaba, through the Laboratory for Computer Application in Design and Manufacturing - SCPM. The project is funded by DFG - Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, by CAPES - Coordination for Improvement of Higher Education Personnel and by FINEP - Financier of Studies and Projects, inside the BRAGECRIM program.

Manufacturing is an activity each time more collaborative and distributed, is developed in units of flexible and adaptable productions, and carried out in processes increasingly interrelated and independent of time and space, in which the concepts of simultaneous engineering are applied. These features enable the availability of innovative and complexes products on the market in ever shorter time, and only became possible with the development of IT tools capable of working with high volumes of data in a decentralized environment. All these advantages are only obtained if the challenge of the data integration in an environment highly heterogeneous and distributed is overcome in relation of time and space.

To cope with this complexity, the project as showed in Figure 1, proposes to structure the manufacturing activity on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), in which each one of the activities of the product development obtained through manufacturing is available through a service, and the product life cycle, from conception until its proper disposal or recycling, be managed through these services, which can be provided by various agents at any time and place.

Figura 1: FedMan Structure

To uncomplicate these heterogeneous connections, it is necessary to work at its highest level with documents, Figure 2, that are the manageable units of information; information, in turn, is the aggregation of data semantics that, finally, are signals with a particular syntax. In the most abstract level there is the human management of documents, and in the more concrete level are the activities with the data made by IT tools. The FedMan project uses a layered structure to provide to the manufacturing process managers a possibility to work with documents, so that the information exchanged between the services are always made together with semantics.

Figure 2: Data, Information and Documents

A model of semantic description, in the intermediate layer between services and applications, is the focus of this project, so that each stage of the product lifecycle is able to use services to access the necessary information for its activity, being considered a distributed environment in which the information is not centralized, but federative. This integrative proposal harmonizes interdisciplinary models of manufactured products, in what regards to products, processes or resources, and provides a communication mode between the involved teams in the process and its applications.

Membros da equipe :

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Schützer		schuetzer@unimep.br
MSc. Eng. Antonio Álvaro de Assis Moura		atamoura@unimep.br
Eng. Fabrício Kenji Morita		fkmorita@unimep.br
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Reiner Anderl		anderl@dik.tu-darmstadt.de
Dipl.-Ing. Christian Mosch		mosch@dik.tu-darmstadt.de