Data exchange strategy for manufacturing simulation of shop floor information systems

Simulation is defined as the imitation of the operation of a system or real-world process over time, and in many cases, manufacturing provides one of the most important applications of simulation (Zolfaghari and Roa, 2006). Standard interfaces could make information sharing effective, and hence promote the utilization of simulators. An information model (McLean et al., 2005), which represents machine shop data and facilitates data sharing among machine shop’s manufacturing execution system, scheduling system, and simulation system, has been developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This paper briefs the machine shop information model. This paper discusses information exchange, using NIST’s information model, between different representations and presents an algorithm to exchange data between a database system and an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) [1] document. The algorithm has been built based on Document Object Model (DOM), XML Path Language (XPath), and Open Database Connectivity Database Engine (ODBC). The paper also describes interfaces for XML schema’s validation, structured query, and data transfer.