Modern machineries are often cyber-physical system-of-systems controlled by intelligent controllersfor collaborative operations on the productions of complex products. To assure theefficiency and effectiveness, a consolidation of concerns across managerial levels, product lifecyclestages, and product lines or families becomes necessary. This calls for a common informationinfrastructure in terms of ontology, models, methods and tools. For industrial manufacturerssubjected to increased cost pressure and market volatility, the availability of such an informationinfrastructure would promote their abilities of making optimized and proactive decisions andthereby their competitiveness and survivability. This paper presents a virtual environment thatconstitutes an information infrastructure for the management and development of evolvableproduction systems (EPS) in manufacturing. It adopts mature modeling frameworks throughEAST-ADL for an effective model-based approach. The contribution is centered on a meta-modelthat offers a common data specification and semantic basis for information management acrossproduct lifecycle, models and tools, both for resource planning and for anomaly treatment. Aprototype tool implementation of this virtual environment for validation is also presented.
QC 20150624