Design and implementation of an open manufacturing information system to enhance data sharing and exchanging among applications

This paper describes the design of manufacturing objects done with the EXPRESS modeling language, and its implementation in a suite of Java classes. The Java suite constitutes an open manufacturing information system and a set of services, which are used to modify it. The rationale behind the objects model of the manufacturing information system is the fact that computer applications (CAD, CAM, CAPP or PAC) require static data from manufacturing objects like machine-tools, robots, ASRSs or AGVs but they use proprietary formats to store it. The proprietary formats lead to incompatibilities and interoperability problems among the applications. The proposed manufacturing objects and their implementation constitute a solution to facilitate data sharing and exchanging of flexible manufacturing resources.