Copyright @ IF AC CIM in Process and Manufacturing Industries, Espoo, Finland, 1992 elM INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: AN EXPRESS-BASED INTEGRATION PLATFORM L.M. CAMARINHA-MATOS; A.L. OS6RIO Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Quinta da Torre - 2825 Monte Caparica - Portugal Tel. +351-1-2953213 Fax +351-1-2955641 E-mail: {cam,lo}@fctunl.pt Abstract. An Express - based Information Management System is presented as a kernel for integration of distributed beterogeneous systems in CIM. Concepts and instances sbared by the integrated CIM components as well as administrative met-information is included in the Information System arcbitecture. A discussion of the experimental results, weaknesses and benefits of our current implementation and limitations of tbe Express language is made in the framework of a prototype developed in the Esprit Project CIM-PLATO. Keywords. Flexible manufacturing, information storage system, manufacturing processes, standards, distributed data processing. 1. INTRODUCTION Recent developments in CIM can be summarized by a great emphasis on Information Integration, Integrating Infrastructures, definition of Reference Models and Standardization. A CIM system can be seen, from a software perspective, as large federation of distributed heterogeneous modules. Each module comes from a different source and was developed using c.'ifferent programming technologies and support environments. As such modules are supporting tools for diversified activities, they were designed under different "cultural" backgrounds, what brings different views of the same concepts, different interaction paradigms and different target users. As a classical approach, an information-based approach for integration is normally assumed. From a realization point of view, the adoption of standards for information exchange - like STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data) and its modelling language Express / Express-G - is vital in a perspective of evolutive integration. Another important issue to systems integration is the control architecture. To get a consistent system out of a collection of components it is not enough to provide a software bus and to normalize information models. It is also important to establish rules and mechanisms to control the way and time schedule in which tools access and modify information. Administrative information and related control functionalities is, therefore, an important addition to the CIM Information System. Along the above ideas, this paper describes the concept of integration and implementation experience of an Express-based Information 103 Management System inside the Esprit project CIM- PLATO. 2. INFORMATION BASED INTEGRATION To realize the integration of a set of heterogeneous tools / subsystems various problems have to be solved including: i) definition of common models for shared cor. .::epts, in order to support an effective exchange of information; ii) realization / adoption of an Information Management System; and iii) in conjunction with the IMS, realization of an integrating infrastructure that provides a functional support for integration, i.e., a kind of "software bus" offering high level interprocess communication services to the connected tools. An example of an information-based integration system can be found in Fig. 1. This example is one of the demonstrator systems developed in CIM- PLATO (demonstrator OtoM) (Welz, 1992) and follows a reference model common to many other systems developed in other projects. This demonstrator integrates a set of tools developed by different industrial and academic partners that cooperate to carry out the main planning activities from product configuration to manufacturing at shop floor level. In an attempt to be, as far as possible, compliant with standards, STEP (STEP 1991) and its modeling language Express (Express Language 1991) were adopted as common tools by all consortium. As it stands now, STEP includes a huge library of product related entities, which don't fit with the needs of our IS. On one side, an example prototype needs only a partial subset of product related entities