Rule-based integration of business oriented and technical components in CIM systems

Today many enterprises are forced to produce products which fulfill individual customer requirements. This situation results in an exploding number of variant parts of a product again resulting in a huge number of product data. To meet these new requirements, many enterprises introduced powerful CIM systems. Normally, this leaded to heterogeneous EDP concepts which are characterized by autonomous CIM components, each with its own database. This paper illustrates how rule-based management of product data on the one hand significantly reduces the amount of product data and how rule-based management of product data on the other hand allows to automate data exchange between several CIM components. One important consequence of this approach is, that the integration of business oriented and technical components within a CIM system is significantly improved.