A Data Propagation Infrastructure for PLM

Recent research in the area of ubiquitous computing lead to innovative technologies for acquisition, storage and communication of real-world information, resulting in a multitude of so called ¿smart items¿. Prominent examples for that are RFID and wireless sensor nodes. Key to everaging the full power of these items is to embedd them into a system architecture. In this paper we present such an architecture especiallydesigend for the area of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), where smart items are embedded into products to become online data sources for business processes. Key to our approach is the adoption of the service oriented paradigm throughout the complete system, including the smart items themselves. By using standard, service oriented protocols for our reference implementation we furthermore allow the adoption of our system in merely arbitrary applicaitons based on arbritrary smart items.First tests of our reference implementation prove the suitability of our concepts, thus opening the door for business processes based on globally distributed smart items.