A Service Bus Architecture for Application Integration in the Planning and Production Phases of a Product Lifecycle

Constantly changing business conditions require a high level of flexibility in business processes as well as an adaptive and fully interoperable IT infrastructure in today’s manufacturing environments. The lack of flexibility prevents manufacturing companies from improving their responsiveness and adapting their workflows to turbulent scenarios. In order to achieve highly flexible and adaptive workflows, information systems in digital factories and shop floors need to be integrated. The most challenging problem in such manufacturing environments is the high heterogeneity of the IT landscape, where the integration of legacy systems and information silos has led to chaotic architectures over the last two decades. In order to overcome this issue, the authors present a flexible integration platform that allows a loose coupling of distributed services in event-driven manufacturing environments. The proposed approach enables a flexible communication between digital factory and shop floor components by introducing a service bus architecture. This solution integrates an application-independent canonical message format for manufacturing events, content-based routing and transformation services as well as event processing workflows. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2470-2.ch010