Control and Management of Information Flow for Computer Integrated Manufacturing

A mechanism to control and manage the information flow among all of the manufacturing application systems, in order to form an integrated manufacturing system, is proposed in this paper. The goal is to achieve a fully integrated manufacturing management system. The INformation System for Integrated Manufacturing (INSIM) reflects a design methodology to build a knowledge base to serve as the information control mechanism. The methodology includes the collection of rules (knowledge acquisition), their graphical modeling, systematic model validation and automated implementation to an operating production system. This design methodology features an enhanced graphic modeling toolUpdated Petri Nets (UPN)which is capable of modeling database updates and retrievals, under specific constraints and conditions and uses a hierarchical modeling approach. For this purpose an UPN editor was developed which is used to create, explode, unfold, validate and correct the information flow model. Finally, a prototype knowledge based system written in Update Oependencies Language (UOL) a special rule specification language was implemented as a result of direct and automatic translation of UPN.