Structuring and configuration of CIM systems for branch-specific medium-sized enterprises

Abstract

Strong international competition makes it necessary for an enterprise to reduce organizational overhead and costs. This goal can be reached by integrating of the available islands of automation. This integration would be facilitated greatly if there were a generally agreed upon architectural structure in which the software modules of the various vendors could operate. CIMOSA (computer integrated manufacturing—open system architecture) aims at providing such an architectural structure and strives to become a European standard. An important part of CIMOSA consists of the enterprise model. In this article the results of a project are described which is aimed at the validation of CIMOSA in a typical SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) environment. In a first step, the CIMOSA partial and particular models for SMEs were developed. The authors developed a coarse model of the order management and a detailed model of the future concept of the CAD/PPC interface. In order to master the increasing complexity of the planning of software systems of an enterprise, new planning methods and tools are required. Thus in the second part, an integrated approach to software system planning and selection based on CIMOSA enterprise models was developed. The underlying idea of the approach is the conversion of the planning problem into an equivalent constraint satisfaction problem. The conversion process can be accomplished fully automatically. To interconnect a real system, in a lot of cases, it is required to configure data conversion modules. In the third part, the article focuses on a configuration system which allows a straightforward configuration of the data conversion modules.