Interdisciplinary Data Exchange in the Development of Assembly Systems

Development of assembly systems is a multidisciplinary mechatronic engineering process. In each engineering discipline one or more engineering tools are applied to support the discipline-specific engineering tasks. These engineering tools manage the engineering data distributed and in different formats. A big amount of these engineering data are needed to be shared between the engineering tools. Today data exchange across different engineering tools can only take place through a limited number of proprietary interfaces and in a limited scope. Most of the shared engineering data is inputted manually and repetitively. This causes often an incorrect and inconsistent data management. Reuse and consistency of these engineering data across the whole development process is a major challenge in today's mechatronic engineering. This paper presents a new approach of modeling an extensible multidisciplinary information system (EMIS) in order to manage the shared engineering data for the entire engineering of assembly systems. Each applied engineering tool needs only one tool-specific interface to exchange the shared engineering data with the EMIS automatically.