Over the past years, it has become more common in industry to use virtual manufacturing applications such as robotic simulations, FEM-analysis and factory flow simulation in various stages of the development of products and production facilities. As a result, today’s industry struggles with providing sufficient data for the growing virtual manufacturing activities, especially in situations where multiple subcontractors and project partners are involved. However, there have seldom been any specific requirements on the data shared by these engineering tools. This paper describes a project for maintaining context, semantic and structure on information acquired by VMS applications in an adequate way. The use of standards associated with this kind of work is strongly advocated. Therefore, standards covering different areas have to be considered and combined in order to form a solid foundation for the project.
T. Karlsson, J. Oscarson