Data exchange among different modules in a manufacturing or service framework

With the advancements in information technology and the growing importance of concurrent design and development in both manufacturing and service industries, it becomes necessary for more and more diverse applications to interact with one another and function in a cohesive manner in order to satisfy the ever-changing customer requirements. Increased interaction among applications engenders a data-exchange problem. The increasing popularity of distributed and service-oriented computing only compounds this problem. The different service providers have to be able to read and interpret data from other service providers. Moreover, some of the software applications predate the recent developments in data exchange standards like XML, EXPRESS among others. A novel approach is proposed to solve this data exchange problem. A region is defined to cover a section of the data source that contains data with a particular structure. Tools can be applied to a region to split it into sub-regions which may or may not be of the same structure. Tools are parameterised by the syntactic elements that define how structures are to be parsed. This simple idea of parsing data sources by defining a series of hierarchical structured regions has been successfully applied to many existing legacy codes in the engineering domain. It also lends itself to the development of a powerful Graphical User Interface (GUI) front-end to easily define the regions. The presentation will develop the theory behind this novel approach and show examples of its application.