IMDAS—An integrated manufacturing data administration system

摘要

A typical manufacturing facility uses a set of heterogeneous computer systems to support various design, planning, and manufacturing activities. These systems usually consist of different hardware (computers, NC machines, robots and workstations), software (operating systems, programming languages) and application systems (analysis packages, simulators, database management systems, file management systems). The databases of these systems are often different in their logical and physical structures since they are established using different data management facilities and their structures are tailored to support the various design and manufacturing activities. In Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), these systems need to be interconnected to allow sharing of hardware and software resources and the timely delivery of data to these component systems. This paper describes the architecture of an Integrated Manufacturing Data Administration System (IMDAS) which provides the users and application software with a unified view of the global database that is physically distributed among dissimilar component systems. The IMDAS provides a high-level semantic view of the global database using a semantic association model OSAM∗ and a high-level language for global data manipulation to enable the user or the application software to access the global database easily and meaningfully.