Supporting Software Interoperability using Standardised Interfaces: Issues and Needs

This paper reports the experience, gained in two different European research projects, TexWIN and ARTISAN, in connecting software prototypes with pre-existing enterprise software like ERP and Scheduler. The two systems aim to support human in optimizing the production processes, but their functioning clearly depends also on the collaboration with external software systems; this collaboration is needed for production data collection and the interfacing with enterprise machine control systems. Activities in the projects regarded the analysis and design of a communication system for the data exchange with the enterprise software: various possibilities and existing standards were considered and the feasibility of their adoption established but, despite the declared project objectives, the standard based interfaces were not implemented. The aim of this paper is to describe both the followed approach to introduce standards in the research project activities and to propose a first analysis of the reasons for the missing concrete adoption of standardized interfaces.