An infrastructure for integrated document management

In any industrial environment, information flow and control can greatly influence the efficiency of the enterprise. While the technology to create and transfer these electronic documents has been developed, little has been done towards the management of these functions. Advanced networks and file manager systems allow distributed access and control but fail to provide a measure of discipline of how these documents should be categorized and manipulated.

No matter what the level of technology involved, in order to truly integrate an enterprise, all documentation and information flow must be controlled and monitored. Existing document control systems are either customized for a particular industry or are too proprietary for common use. A generic and flexible document management system would not only be useful in the manufacturing function of the enterprise but would also help integrate it with the business function on a macro level. Such a system should also allow users to exchange data with other users in a simple manner. This would help promote the integration of engineering teams as complete workgroups would be able to share data and information in an integrated fashion.

In some cases, where a high degree of automation is required and possible, several intelligent applications should be able to share and transfer data autonomously without the intervention of human operators. Further, since the philosophy of information control is not limited to the bounds of the manufacturing realm, the same system could be used in a non-manufacturing environment as well.

This projects presents a flexible and modular infrastructure to allow distributed information sharing and application integration. A software system, built for the Windows environment on PC’s is provided to demonstrate the utility and capabilities of this infrastructure. A prototype autonomous module has also been included in this work to demonstrate the ability to plug in and integrate similar independent software applications under the developed software system. This prototype provides a template for future development of similar applications based on the developed infrastructure and software system. The software system uses shared directories to achieve distributed data management.