Composition and Dependency Relationships in Production Information System Design

Flexible Manufacturing System provides many alternative machines and conveying paths to manufacture a given part. Thus control of such complex systems must be bent, via an effective Production Information System (PIS), to a powerful Decision Making System (DMS) which has to compute the best alternatives in real-time. This paper presents such a Production Information System (PIS) for Flexible Manufacturing Systems. First it is briefly shown how the PIS incorporates models of both data sources (the FMS) and information requirements of planning, scheduling and control functions. Then structure and semantics modelling of information are emphasized using concepts of the knowledge-based system SHOOD. Utility of the system semantic relationships among objects, especially those of composition and dependency, is stressed.