A security architecture integrated co-operative engineering platform for organised model exchange in a Digital Factory environment

Besides reduced development times, the constantly growing pressure of competition and the permanent vicissitude and shortened product life cycles due to customer-oriented product variants require a strong decrease of planning and engineering times. The Digital Factory, a virtual representation of a real factory based on an integrated data model, provides an important contribution to attain this goal. In near future, the company-internal Digital Factory has to be expanded to the real inter-company plant production processes. These are distributed engineering processes in a co-operation project with globally located partners. This involves the support of security and trustworthy networks in co-operative engineering. Next to the management of the high volumes of data exchanged, the efficiency of the engineers work has to be increased in co-operation projects. In this paper, new methodologies for computer-supported co-operative development engineering (CSCDE) are developed. Environmental constraints for a successful application of CSCDE are identified and classified. Based on these methodologies, a CSCDE software architecture for relationship management and secure exchange of Digital Factory data between globally located engineering and development partners using XML and Web Service technologies is presented.