Software integration technologies in CIM

Abstract

Two CASE-tools for Computer-Integrated Manufacturing are proposed: CIMVIEW, for high level, functional, top-down integration, company-specific analysis and modelling; and CIMGLUE, for low level, bottom-up integration, and interfacing of existing applications. In CIMVIEW the user interactively builds an SA/SD dataflow model of the functions of the company. The functional decomposition of ‘bubles’ is internally converted into Lisp representation. The contents of the dataflow ‘arrows’ is derived interactively from the actual customer files or scanned paper documents and converted into hierarchic Lisp lists. The result is a Lisp model of the company functions under investigation. This model can be utilized by Lisp-based tools for many purposes, including symbolic simulation, animation, metrics, data consistency and usage checks, and the automatic generation of the interface specifications, or the automatic generation of modified forms after simplification of the dataflows. CIMGLUE is a general tool to build representation conversion programs between almost any software packages, A and B. The conversion program is built interactively, utilizing examples of package A output and package B input. Both CIMGLUE and CIMVIEW tools are described at a general level for different implementations. A CIMVIEW-prototype has been implemented based on Common Lisp and Common Windows. In the STIF (semantically transparent interfacing) method, the probably variable definitions of the transferred items are isolated outside the interface as much as possible, instead of using cross-references inside the interface. This is done by embedding some elements of the definition language of application A into the definition language of application B. A method of semantically transparent interfacing, STIF, is also defined, and two cases in which it has been applied are briefly described.