An Application of XML Based Manufacturing Information for Forming Shop

As the automation of ship production system proliferates, it is unavoidable to move the real machinery, facility, application software, and virtual environment from the heterogeneous data environment to the integrated one. However, it is a prevailing situation that each component operates under the different environment, due to the inability of interchanging the data in a structured manner between the components. The issue is obstacles to improvement of the application system. To facilitate seamless exchange of data among the manufacturing systems, STEP, PDML, and XML has been tried by other studies. This study has investigated how XML data can be applied to exchange the data among the ship production system components. XML data is applied to the forming shop in shipyard to overcome the present difficulties on sharing and exchanging of the information. An example of forming information is represented by XML to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. In addition, an application of XML information applicable to virtual factory and electronic work order sheet is included.