An Industry 4.0 Engineering Workflow Approach: From Product Catalogs to Product Instances

Todays engineering processes utilize purchased parts from different manufacturers to set up a product model within engineering tools. As manufacturers provide product data using different catalog services, multiple interfaces have to be implemented to integrate data of purchased parts into engineering tools. By downloading the data into the engineering tool at a certain time, data consistency is interrupted. A holistic solution is still missing. This paper depicts an integrative concept to utilize Industry 4.0 components in the engineering process, allowing an extension of data consistency from manufacturers product descriptions over engineering tools to the product life cycle.