Information integration platform for CIMS

A new information integration platform for computer integrated manufacturing system (CIMS) is presented, which is based on agent and CORBA. CORBA enhances the system integration because it is an industry-standard for interoperable, distributed objects across heterogeneous hardware and software platform. Agent technology is used to improve intelligence of the integration system. In order to implement the information integration platform, we use a network integration server to integrate the network, design a generic database agent to integrate database, adopt multi-agent based architecture to integrate application, and utilize wrapper as a CORBA object to integrate legacy code.published_or_final_versio

Experiences with the use of CORBA

Distributed computer integrated manufacturing systems (CIM) developed by integrating commercial and off-the-shelf software components, have to fulfil the needs of flexibility required by the end-users and the production line itself. A software architecture designed for a product family and standard interface technologies are a good basis for extendible and scalable systems that can be connected to factory management systems. In our approach an object-oriented technology is used to increase flexibility and reuse in a product family of manufacturing execution systems (MES). The CORBA technology for transparent communication and a legacy system with application-specific CORBA wrappers provide the interoperability necessary for heterogeneous manufacturing systems. The event-driven behaviour of MES applications is supported by an active database based on a commercial CORBA implementation and an object-oriented database