Resource modeling for the integration of the manufacturing enterprise

Researchers are beginning to develop taxonomies of different knowledge domains in order to specify the requirements of engineering functions in various manufacturing enterprises. These interrelated functions include product design, process planning, capacity planning, production costing, quality control, acquisition or reconfiguration of resources, planning and scheduling of shop activities, and execution of shop activities. These taxonomies and functions are not typically integrated in today's manufacturing enterprise. This results in inefficient manual transfer of knowledge between domains and the unavailability of critical information required for decision making. Object-oriented design methodologies are useful for modeling diverse information and behavior. Furthermore, planning, analysis, and control of resources such as machine tools, fixtures, and tooling increasingly dominate the engineering functions. This paper demonstrates how to integrate these functions with an object-oriented resource model that links information from different knowledge domains. These functions are implemented using different software packages that can easily access the common resource data because the data are embedded in the resource class structure. This resource model is based on software objects that have a one-to-one correspondence with physical objects. This resource model is illustrated using object-oriented software, but the model may also be applied to distributed object and agent architectures.