A reference model for factory engineering and design

Today factories can be considered as products, which contribute to value creation by efficient transformation of resources into high-adding value products and which have to be continuously adapted. The engineering of future factories requires digital tools to support the life cycle phases from investment planning to ramp-up and scientific-based integrated highly-dynamic data management systems. This paper presents a Reference Model for holistic Factory Engineering and Design and a Grid-based Factory Data Management, centred on a generic Factory Data Model based on state-of-the-art Grid, workflow and digital manufacturing technologies. The developed planning environment, its architecture, the employed technologies, the estimated benefits and a validation scenario are presented and integrated in a Roadmap of current and future research activities in the field of factory engineering and design.