Most manufacturing environments are federated systems. In manufacturing, the term federation describes a collection of devices and software from multiple vendors that must work together to support business and operational processes. In theory, integrating federated systems is not too hard. Most devices have some form of communication available, and most software has some method for importing and exporting files, some way to request information, and some way to respond to requests. In practice, there are multiple issues to address to integrate federated systems, including the meaning and format of the exchanged data; the meaning of names, identifiers, and enumeration values; the devices and applications that actually send and receive data; and finally the technologies used for sending and receiving the exchanged data.
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