Smart Engineering for Smart Factories: How OSLC Could Enable Plug & Play Tool Integration

In this paper OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) is proposed as key element in an approach for tool integration. OSLC enables data exchange and resource linking across tools within smart engineering, assisting thereby factories in behaving smart. According to OSLC’s description, a core specification and several domain specifications assist software developers in implementing standardized interfaces for information exchange, which allow low-cost exchangeability of tools providing the same type of data. Due to the resource linking approach of OSLC (instead of data synchronization), the typical integration challenges of traceability, data consistency and data interoperability across the whole lifecycle process are appropriately managed and therefore assist collaboration, reuse and integration. Traceability across engineering tools can be a key enabler for smart factories. However, applied to the whole engineering process of a smart production lifecycle, which is in this approach based on the V-model, advantages and challenges yet to be solved of this approach arise, which is why this paper focuses engineering to be able to assist smart factories in future.