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Production planning and management in an extended enterprise

Objective

PRODNET-II aims to design and develop an open platform and the IT protocols and mechanisms needed to support virtual industrial enterprises. The architecture will employ new emerging standards and advanced technologies in communication, cooperative information management, and distributed decision making.

PRODNET-II will address several virtual enterprise environment requirements and necessary steps, i.e.:
- to improve the understanding of the nature and structure of the business data and the information that needs to be communicated between partners in a virtual industrial enterprise, with a particular emphasis on business flexibility and specific aspects relevant to SMEs;
- to design and develop a software infrastructure to provide an environment for this data and information to be exchanged, shared and managed in the virtual industrial network, unlike the present integration mechanisms that are typically closed and proprietary;
- to promote the utilisation of international standards such as STEP, EDIFACT, Internet computing/Java, ISO 9000 etc. to assist SMEs to maintain and improve their competitiveness in the European and world-wide market;
- to speed up and support the implementation of open, standard software components, that are easy to use, low in cost and provide a high value-added benefit, which are required by SMEs; and
- to provide the opportunity for the IT vendors to support many requirements set by the SMEs, and to implement new products taking advantage of an emerging market which will be global in its nature by the year 2000.

In addition to supporting the main virtual enterprise environment requirements mentioned above, a number of specific functionalities are supported by the proposed PRODNET-II system, that include:
- Efficiency of orders flow, namely by the combination of EDI and STEP;
- Support for follow-up of order status along the network
- Distributed and dynamic scheduling;
- Incomplete and imprecise orders acceptance and management;
- Network-wide workload optimisation;
- Open communication of total product data.

Also, in PRODNET-II, an open reference architecture with well defined interface specifications, will allow other software companies to develop compatible products. An operational demonstrator involving PRODNET-II end-user nodes, partly in Europe and partly in Brazil is planned. Compared to other world-wide R&D activities, PRODNET-II shows a number of advantages and innovative factors.

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Call for proposal

Data not available

Funding Scheme

EIF - Marie Curie actions-Intra-European Fellowships

Coordinator

Csin-Construçao de Software E Automaçao Na Industria, Lda
EU contribution
No data
Address
Rua Da Areosa 229 CV/A
4200 Porto
Portugal

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Total cost
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Participants (7)

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Last update: 6 October 1999

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Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/FP4_22647

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