Other Computer Engineering Commons^™

Manufacturing Interoperability, Steven Ray, Al Jones

Steven R Ray

As manufacturing and commerce become ever more global, companies are dependent increasingly upon the efficient and effective sharing of information with their partners, wherever they may be. Leading manufacturers perform this sharing with computers, which must therefore have the required software to encode and decode the associated electronic transmissions. Because no single company can dictate that all its partners use the same software, standards for how the information is represented become critical for error-free transmission and translation. The terms interoperability and integration are frequently used to refer to this error-free transmission and translation. This paper summarizes two projects underway at …

Manufacturing Interoperability, Steven Ray, Al Jones

Steven R Ray

As manufacturing and commerce become ever more global in nature, companies are increasingly dependent upon the efficient and effective exchange of information with their partners, wherever they may be. Leading manufacturers rely upon computers to perform this information exchange, which must therefore be encoded for electronic transmission. Because no single company can dictate that all its partners use the same software, standards for how the information is represented become critical for cost-effective, errorfree transmission of data. This paper discusses some interoperability issues related to current standards, and describes two projects underway at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in …

An Analysis Of Requirements For Specifying Manufacturing Engineering And Business Processes, Steven Ray, Amy Knutilla, Craig Schlenoff

Steven R Ray

A wide range of manufacturing software applications deal with the manipulation and expression of collections of activities. Examples include manufacturing process planning, production scheduling, simulation, project management, workflow, business process reengineering, and product realization process modeling. While each of these applications serves a specific audience and need and focuses on particular aspects of a process, much could be gained by sharing process information among applications. One of the primary obstacles to such integration is the lack of any common representation of what is really the underlying concept of process. The objective of the work described here is to investigate the …

Process Specification Language: An Analysis Of Existing Representations, Amy Knutilla, Stephen Polyak, Craig Schlenoff, Shu Cheah, Steven Ray, Richard Anderson

Steven R Ray

The goal of the NIST Process Specification Language (PSL) project is to investigate and arrive at a neutral, unifying representation of process information to enable sharing of process data among manufacturing engineering and business applications. This paper focuses on the second phase of the project, the analysis of existing process representations to determine how well existing process representation methodologies support the requirements for specifying processes found in Phase One. This analysis will provide an objective basis from which to develop a comprehensive language and will promote the leveraging of existing work.

Development Of A Message Model To Support Integrated Design And Manufacturing, Venkat Allada, Steven Ray

Steven R Ray

Mere sharing of information between engineering design systems and manufacturing systems does not represent an ideal integrated system. While information sharing represents an important aspect of an integrated design and manufacturing environment, an equally critical aspect is the "interaction" capability of the two systems. This interaction could be in the form of feedback and request messages between the design and manufacturing systems. The goal of this study is to investigate the issues involved in the development of a conceptual message model that will facilitate an "upstream" and a "downstream" communication between the design activities and process planning activities. The development …

Proceedings Of The First Process Specification Language (Psl) Roundtable, Craig Schlenoff, Amy Knutilla, Steven Ray

Steven R Ray

In April, 1997, the Process Specification Language (PSL) Project held a Roundtable discussion at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The goals of the Roundtable was to assemble key champions and stakeholders of various approaches towards process representation in order to discuss the relative merits to reach consensus on a language architecture and to establish a technical approach for proceeding. It was agreed that the language architecture should be based upon a formal semantic foundation, upon which would be layered a number of syntactic mappings, each with one or more presentations.

In discussions about principal concepts of any …

Unified Process Specification Language: Requirements For Modeling Process, Craig Schlenoff, Amy Knutilla, Steven Ray

Steven R Ray

A wide range of applications deal with the manipulation and expression of collections of activities. Examples include project management, workflow management, business process reengineering, product realization process modeling, manufacturing process planning, production scheduling, simulation, and Computer Aided Software Engineering, each of which is supported by some combination of graphical programming and control languages, Petri nets, PERT charts or other representation methodology. Each of these applications serves a specific audience and need, and focuses on particular aspects of a process. Nevertheless, much could be gained by sharing information among applications. One of the primary obstacles to such integration is the lack …

An Architecture Of Component - Based Capp Systems For Agile Manufacturing, Chun Zhang, Shaw Feng, Steven Ray

Steven R Ray

The current manufacturing planning software systems (such as computer aided process planning (CAPP) systems) are general and in a closed form, i.e., it is very difficult to modify these systems to respond to a user's dynamically changing needs. These systems are no longer suitable for agile manufacturing. This research work aims at developing an architecture for rapid development of CAPP systems. The architecture supports the construction of CAPP systems from prepackaged, plug-compatible software components. The specifications of the architecture and its building blocks are defined. A prototype system is under development to prove the concept.

Reference Architecture For Machine Control Systems Integration: Interim Report, M Senehi, Thomas Kramer, John Michaloski, Richard Quintero, Steven Ray, William Rippey, Sarah Wallace

Steven R Ray

No abstract provided.