Rule-based management of routing plans 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. If frequent updates of such a great number of variant parts are necessary, the maintenance of the corresponding data with conventional methods and software systems is often made to expensive or sometimes even impossible. The introduced rule-based routing plan processor extends conventional relational database systems with rules and operations for the dynamic generation of routing plans. Moreover, it allows the transformation of dependencies between bill of material data and routing plan data into a database. With this approach an efficient management of routing plans is provided and redundancy and inconsistency are prevented.