DIMS: Implementation of a Federated Information Management System for PRODNET II

The Esprit project PRODNET II1 (Production Planning and Management in an Extended Enterprise) had as its main objective the development of a reference architecture and a support infrastructure for Industrial Virtual Enterprises (VEs). The Distributed Information Management system (DIMS) component of the PRODNET architecture supports the complex VE information management requirements and is based on a federated database architecture. In the design of DIMS, general concepts of federated database systems are specifically tailored and adapted to the specificities of the VE paradigm. In previous work, the federated information management requirements for industrial collaborative VE environments have been systematically analyzed. This analysis has identified the required data models and data manipulation operations for the PRODNET application domain. Based on this analysis, the need for federated sharing and exchange of information among the VE enterprises, while preserving their autonomy with proper information visibility rights, are also reported in earlier documents. The focus of this paper is on describing the internal kernel design and certain implementation aspects of the DIMS federated database architecture for PRODNET. In particular, the main components of the internal DIMS architecture are described in details, such as the interoperable server agent, the generic federated query processor, and the export schema manager among other development issues.