UPE: Utah Prototyping Previous: Introduction

Background

To integrate the work among different teams and sites working in such a large project, there must be some kind of synchronization to facilitate the communication and cooperation between them. A concurrent engineering infrastructure that encompasses multiple sites and subsystems, called Palo Alto Collaborative Testbed (PACT), was proposed in [2]. The issues discussed in that work were: cooperative development of interfaces, protocols, and architecture, sharing of knowledge among heterogeneous systems, and computer-aided support for negotiation and decision-making.

An execution environment for heterogeneous systems called ``InterBase'' was proposed in [1]. It integrates preexisting systems over a distributed, autonomous, and heterogeneous environment via a tool-based interface. In this environment each system is associated with a Remote System Interface (RSI) that enables the transition from the local heterogeneity of each system to a uniform system-level interface.

Object orientation and its applications to integrate heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed systems are discussed in [5]. The argument in this work is that object-oriented distributed computing is a natural step forward from the client-server systems of today. Automated, flexible and intelligent manufacturing based on object-oriented design and analysis techniques is discussed in [4], and a system for design, process planning and inspection is presented.

A management system for the generation and control of documentation flow throughout a whole manufacturing process is presented in [3]. The method of quality assurance is used to develop this system that covers cooperative work between different departments for documentation manipulation.

A computer-based architecture program called the Distributed and Integrated Environment for Computer-Aided Engineering (Dice), which addresses the coordination and communication problems in engineering, was developed at the MIT Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory [6].

In the environment we are proposing, several subsystems are communicating through a central interface layer (CI), and each subsystem has a subsystem interface (SSI) responsible for data transformation between the subsystem and the CI. Adding new subsystem can be achieved by writing an SSI for this new subsystem, adding it to the list of the subsystems in the CI, and no changes required to the other SSIs. Removing a subsystem only requires removing its name from the subsystems list in the CI.

UPE: Utah Prototyping Previous: Introduction