A web services-based approach to develop a networked information integration service platform for gear enterprise

In order to deal with the problems of information integration and data sharing across distributed heterogeneous application systems in gear enterprises, it is imperative to build up a high quality information integration platform. Web Services, an emerging form of service-oriented architecture (SOA) for distributed computing, have the potential to serve as a key enabling technology to integrate heterogeneous systems under the distributed environment. This paper presents a novel information integration service platform which offers better support for the networked manufacturing of gear enterprise by taking full advantage of technologies of SOA and Web services. In this paper, the information integrated operation mode of gear enterprise networked manufacturing is deeply analyzed and the functional architecture of the networked information integration service platform is proposed. Furthermore, the application integrated framework of gear enterprise is constructed and the software architecture of the service platform is implemented in the .NET environment. Finally, an actual application example of hypoid gear networked manufacturing is provided to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed platform.