Perspective: A Standards-Based System for Manufacturing Information Integration

This paper presents an infrastructure and a prototype system for a manufacturing information system, which is distributed its nature and is able to store, index, manage, retrieve and present business data, inventory data, and manufacturing processes data. The system works with all kinds of information, such as continuous (i.e., stream oriented) data, production (e.g., decision support) data, legacy data, and multimedia data (say, drawings, pictures, audio signals, voice annotations, and video streams). A key criterion is support for content-based information retrieval across all application areas. The main objective is to provide support for automated information transactions. The prototype of our architecture uses JAVA, STEP (ISO 10303) standard, the Internet, and CORBA. A fully functional system, called Perspective, for retrieval of part and manufacturing process has been designed and implemented in a distributed environment. Among other capabilities, the system can retrieve a set of parts or manufacturing processes based on similarity to some desired criteria.