An architecture for active product configuration management in industrial virtual enterprises

Abstract

The importance of configuration management (CM) is increasingly recognised as customers demand safer, higher-quality, and lower-priced products. Although various standards for configuration management exist, there are no internationally agreed standards. Further, existing CM standards do not address the issue of integrating heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information, especially for virtual enterprises. This paper proposes an architecture for product configuration management in industrial virtual enterprises. The architecture includes the common objects and functions extracted from various CM standards. Based on the World Wide Web (WWW) and common object request broker architecture (CORBA), it will enable the integration of heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information. Further, the architecture adopts a rule concept that will provide an active mechanism for configuration management. A prototype system has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture. The proposed architecture and the prototype will provide a generalised framework and implementation guidelines for CM systems that can shorten the product life cycle, minimise production cost, and guarantee the quality of products in industrial virtual enterprises.