Data integration in Digital Manufacturing based on application Protocols

In order to improve and to shorten product and production development as well as to reach a higher planning and product quality, in industrial companies the use of software tools is state of the art. Particularly in the field of manufacturing process planning known as Digital Manufacturing a wide range of different and specialized software tools is used, e.g. in assembly planning, logistics planning or layout planning. In order to reduce planning effort and to increase planning quality, relevant planning data of the product and production development process must be available to any software tool employed. But due to the lack of open and generally accepted data standards a continuous exchange of data between software tools is hardly possible. The paper on hand introduces a methodology for enabling a standardized description of planning data. In this approach, application-specific data models are used to define data relevant for a certain domain of the product and production development process.