Rule-based management of product data in CIM systems

Today many enterprises have already introduced CIM systems. In many cases such enterprises are characterized by heterogeneous EDP concepts because each CIM component administrates its own databases. Due to this situation, now many CIM enterprises are confronted with high data redundancies and many inconsistencies. Data exchange between several CIM components is impossible or results in complex systems of interfaces between CIM components. In addition many enterprises have to administrate a great number of different variants of a product to fulfill today's customers' demands. The maintenance of the corresponding data with conventional methods and software systems is often made to expensive or sometimes even impossible. Since product data are administrated in most CIM components, in this paper a rule-based product data manager is introduced, which extends conventional relational database systems with rules and operations for the dynamic generation of variant parts and variant bills of material (BOMs). Moreover, it allows the exchange of BOM data between CIM components. With this approach an efficient management of variant parts and variant BOMs is provided and redundancy and inconsistency are prevented.