Data integration in manufacturing industry: Model-based integration of data distributed from ERP to PLC

For manufacturing industry seamless workflows along the whole product lifecycle are crucial for sustainable success. Although the integration of all used systems to a single supersystem is not reasonable, the integration of data is essential. This contribution introduces a model-based concept to integrate data elements of distributed data systems and sources to one virtual database. Specific view models represent the information about data, their relations, properties and environments. The combination of these pieces of information allows the configuration of a middleware platform to establish the interconnection of related data elements across distributed IT systems. This approach tries to feature the missing link between the successful enterprise application integration concept, sophisticated XML-based technologies and established graphical description languages. Instead of a fixed development environment this approach introduces how to adapt and utilize UML and BPMN for a modular and parallelizable integration process to archive a highly company-specific but user-oriented data integration environment.