Virtual Factory Manager of Semantic Data

The growing importance of manufacturing SMEs within the European economy, in terms of Gross Domestic Product and number of jobs, emphasizes the need of proper ICT tools to support their competitiveness. Major ICT players already offer one-does-all Product Lifecycle Management suites, supporting several phases of the product-process-plant definition and management. However, these do also show consistent shortcomings in terms of SME accessibility, degree of personalization and they often lack of an acceptable level of interoperability. These problems are being addressed by the development of a Virtual Factory Framework (VFF), within an EU funded project. The approach is based on four pillars: 1) Semantic Shared Data Model, 2) Virtual Factory Manager (VFM), 3) Decoupled Software Tools that lay on the shared data model and can interact through the VFM, 4) Integration of Knowledge. This paper will focus on the Virtual Factory Manager, proposing an evolution of the former VFF second Pillar (Sacco et al, 2010), that acts as a server supporting the I/O communications within the framework and its stored knowledge for the decoupled software tools needing to access its repository.