Digitalization within the production - data as prerequisite of modern production technology

As a matter of fact, modern production systems are becoming increasingly complex in terms of their structure and functionality. Beside others, this leads to a huge amount of production-related data. To handle this complexity, different domain-specific software systems exist. In practice most of these software solutions accomplish their specific tasks individually and most of the acquired data is maintained separately. As storing all production-related data in one centralized database with respect to the diversity of production is not a target-aiming solution, IT-based approaches to link different data sources and to provide context-related information seem to be useful. The paper introduces first the importance of production-related data as a new production resource. Based on this, the concept of "Linked Factory" as a new approach for data interlinkage is represented. Finally a calculation method to determine the productivity in complex production environments was redesigned using this concept of "Linked Factory". This paper deals with the topic of huge amounts of production-related data available in different IT-based data management solutions, data mostly without sufficient use and interconnection. The presented research is aiming of new approaches in multivalent data usage. On the one hand, the current paper introduces the new concept of the so called "Linked Factory" approach as an innovative data as well as service platform with the goal of domain-across data integration added with a data and information providing using role, location- and context-related service. On the other hand, an upgraded approach, using data that was original acquired for tasks of product traceability, to ensure detailed productivity measurements in complex production environments is given. To represent a scenario, both approaches were combined - so a new "Linked Factory" instance provides the necessary input data to calculate productivity measures. The introduced "Linked Factory" concept allows realizing further applications to increase production transparency and furthermore an added value in production environments.