CEIF: a CORBA-based integrated framework for manufacturing enterprises

As manufacturing industry evolves, enterprise networking becomes more popular and important. At the same time, distributed object computing technology such as CORBA has been developed rapidly and taken into use in many fields. Since CORBA technology has its advantages in an enterprise network environment, a CORBA based integrated framework for manufacturing enterprises called CEIF (Concurrency Engineering Integrated Framework) is proposed. An ORB with essential services and facilities resides in the core of the framework to support its application module, which integrates a multiple view modeling/facilitating tool and key applications in a manufacturing enterprise, and its management module, which provides efficient management function for enterprise network and applications. The architecture of the integrated framework and its application module and management module are described in detail.