Development of a dynamic data interchange scheme to support product design in agile manufacturing

A proficient information system features the capability to response to customer changes in a timely manner such that it facilitates enterprise to achieve the concept of agile manufacturing. The efficient sharing of data and knowledge within an organization is the prerequisite to enhance the competitiveness of companies in this information age. In today's industrial environment, there are a great variety of computer systems and applications, which make the task of data integration among heterogeneous database systems even more difficult and costly, thus hindering the progress of tasks automation. In general, there is a lack of research literature related to the generic approach to link dissimilar databases together for seamless data communication. Therefore, a comprehensive mechanism is required to handle various data format in complex product design processes in order to achieve efficient knowledge retrieval and update information manipulation. This paper introduces a dynamic data interchange scheme which attempts to exchange the data automatically as well as enables the filtering of valuable data between traditional relational database model and case-based reasoning knowledge repository. The significance of this paper is concerned with the intelligent data exchange within a hybrid database system, embracing the empirical data to help agile manufacturing enterprises make critical decisions.