Towards a service bus for distributed manufacturing

The electronic exchange of data between industrial equipment, manufacturing and information systems of companies is becoming increasingly important with the current trend of reducing products' life cycle, wide range of diversified products, and the need to answer the specific needs of each consumer. In this context, quality, time, costs involved in integrating information over the company's internal processes, and in the interaction of these processes with their customers, suppliers and other business partners are in many sectors, far beyond what the current technology and communications solutions enable. This paper presents a communication infrastructure to integrate several companies from different sectors of the supply chain, to exchange their heterogeneous information using a data model which is composed by different standards.