Design of distributed information systems for agile manufacturing virtual enterprises using CORBA and STEP standards : Liangyu Zhou, Rakesh Nagi, v21, n1, 2002, pp14–31
- Publisher
- Society of Manufacturing Engineers
- Year
- 2002
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 153 KB
- Volume
- 21
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0278-6125
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In the global market environment, agile manufacturing companies are forced to cooperate with each other and form temporary opportunistic alliances called virtual enterprises. Each partner may have unique software applications and hardware systems as well as policies and procedures that govern the flow of work. This paper presents a distributed information system architecture for agile manufacturing enterprises such that the heterogeneous partners are seamlessly integrated and more importantly, their internal processes remain unaffected while enterprise-wide information is kept consistent. The architecture is related to the three-tier information communication model proposed by Song and Nagi (1997). This architecture is advanced for partner heterogeneity by incorporating two standards: ( 1) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) for information exchange, and (2) International Standard for the Exchange of Product Data (STEP) for information modeling and mapping. Further proposed for policy integration, is a workflow manager and a systematic approach to develop composite workflows for the virtual enterprise by wrapping the legacy partner workflows. Petri nets and meta data are used to facilitate the workflow simulation and workflow description, respectively. A prototype system has been developed for demonstration purposes.