Federated integration of networked manufacturing service platforms

Networked manufacturing is an advanced manufacturing pattern that was born of information technologies and suits the networked economic environment. Networked manufacturing service platforms have been widely established to support this new pattern. Since the island problems are retarding further development of networked manufacturing, integration of existing networked manufacturing platforms is in demand. A federated integration mode is proposed to integrate the existing networked manufacturing platforms and provide a large-scale distributed resource sharing and cooperative environment. The nature of federated integration is discussed, and the architecture of federated integration system was put forward along with a set of rules and three types of integration services. Two key issues in federated integration are discussed in detail. One is the federation management, including the hierarchy of federations, the basic states of federations and the state-keeping mechanism using factory/instance pattern. The other issue is the authentication, authorization and access control in across-platform applications. Finally, an implementation is presented. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.