Virtual Factory Manager for semantic data handling

The growing importance of manufacturing SMEs within the European economy, in terms of Gross Domestic Product and number of jobs, emphasizes the need of proper ICT tools to support their competitiveness. Major ICT players already offer one-does-all Product Lifecycle Management suites, however, these do show consistent shortcomings in terms of SME accessibility, degree of personalization and they often lack of an acceptable level of interoperability. These problems are being addressed by the development of a Virtual Factory Framework (VFF). The approach is based on four pillars: (1) Semantic Shared Data Model, (2) Virtual Factory Manager (VFM), (3) Decoupled Software Tools and (4) Integration of Knowledge. This paper will focus on the Virtual Factory Manager that acts as a server supporting the I/O communications within the framework and its stored knowledge for the Decoupled Software Tools needing to access its repository.