Integrating the CIM environment using object-oriented data management technology

Integration of a CIM (computer-integrated manufacturing) environment requires coordinated solutions to data-management problems for individual application systems as well as for exchange of data between these applications. This requires a common framework for data management throughout the CIM environment. The authors discuss the object paradigm as a framework for this purpose. They present an experimental data-management environment for engineering, CAD/CAM, and CIM that is based on object technology. The system ROSE, is able to represent both the structured and operational semantics of the data, leading to greater data integrity and facilitating sharing of data between CIM systems. However, the object paradigm's inheritance mechanism is useful only in limited cases. Hence, the object-oriented layer has been made separate from the total system.<>