On Architecting and Composing Through-life Engineering Information Services to Enable Smart Manufacturing

Engineering information systems play an important role in the current era of digitization of manufacturing, which is also known as smart manufacturing. Traditionally, these engineering information systems spanned the lifecycle of a product by providing interoperability of software subsystems through a combination of open and proprietary exchange of data. But research and development efforts are underway to replace this paradigm with engineering information services that can be composed dynamically to meet changing needs in the operation of smart manufacturing systems. This paper describes the opportunities and challenges in architecting such engineering information services and composing them to enable smart manufacturing.