The present invention relates to the technical field of manufacturing execution systems.
Manufacturing execution systems (MES) usually have to access different data sources. Examples of data sources are data bases and real time data sources. Examples of data bases are a material manager data base, a production order manager data base and a performance analyzer data base. Examples of real time data sources are real time data bases and sensors, for example a temperature sensor, a pressure sensor and a smoke sensor. Usually, the data sources are already given in a production plant, when developing a new component of a manufacturing execution system for accessing the data source. It usually requires a considerable effort to analyze the data source, in order to depict it's structure. Even more so, since data sources in real production plants can be of almost any kind, for example they can be implemented as relational data bases, hierarchical data bases, or real time data source s such as sensors. The term structure in this document comprises, for example, the format of data (e.g., file format) and/or the type of data (e.g., string, number, Boolean, vector, data base, . . . ) and/or relations between data objects of the data source and/or architecture of the data source comprised within the data source.