A Middleware for Real-world Aware PLM Applications

Up-to-date information on behavior and conditions of technical products is of key importance for numerous business applications, such as optimisation of use and maintenance of products, effective reuse of parts in other products, and ultimately, design improvement for new products. Ubiquitous computing technologies, like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), embedded computing, sensors and sensor networks, can largely automate the sensing and capturing of product information. Still, it remains the problem to seamlessly integrate them and the captured information in business applications. We have thus developed a middleware system, which allows business applications to communicate with physical products in a uniform and transparent way, regardless of the location of the products and the technology used for data capture. In this paper, the architecture with the design and implementation concepts of the middleware is presented. Further, we describe a first deployment and evaluation of our middleware in a real-world scenario dealing with the maintenance of heavy-load vehicles. The results and experiences are promising and indicate the practicability of our approach.