Cooperative service registries for the service-based Product Lifecycle Management architecture

摘要

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) comprises many different tasks across multiple domains, such as product development and production. Thus, multidisciplinary engineering teams have to collaborate to successfully design and produce products. Nowadays, engineers are supported with many software solutions, which are tailored to the work of each engineer. The problem is the missing or bad integration between these IT solutions, which leads to noncontinuous processes and an insufficient cooperation. The Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) supports the needed flexible integration of applications based on services and moreover an automation and integration of processes via workflows. In previous work, we proposed a service-oriented PLM architecture that provides these benefits and supports continuous processes. Thereby, services of different domains and phases of the product life cycle need to collaborate in a distributed fashion. In this paper, we systematically identify, define and rate representative models for the management of corresponding distributed service registries, which enable an efficient collaboration of services. Based on a prototypical implementation of the best-rated model in a layout redesign scenario, we assess our approach for its suitability in PLM. The selected service registry model provides transparent access to all services of different domains and shows the ease of integrating new applications into the product life cycle. It thereby enables an improved cooperation of engineers across various domains to define cross-domain processes.