Using CORBA to integrate manufacturing cells to a virtual enterprise

It is critical in today’s enterprises that manufacturing facilities are not isolated from design, planning, and other business activities and that information flows easily and bidirectionally between these activities. It is also important and cost-effective that COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) software, databases, and corporate legacy codes are well integrated in the information architecture. Further, much of the information generated during manufacturing must be dynamically accessible to engineering and business operations both in a restricted corporate Intranet and on the Internet. The software integration strategy in the Sandia Agile Manufacturing Testbed supports these enterprise requirements. We are developing a CORBA-based distributed object software system for manufacturing. Each physical machining device is a CORBA object and exports a common IDL interface to allow for rapid and dynamic insertion, deletion, and upgrading within the manufacturing cell. Cell management CORBA components access manufacturing devices without knowledge of any device-specific implementation. To support information flow from design to planning to manufacturing, an electronic traveler, itself a persistent CORBA object, has been developed. Thus, design and planning data is accessible to machinists on the shop floor. CORBA allows manufacturing components to be easily accessible to the enterprise. Dynamic clients can be created using web browsers and portable Java GUI’s. A CORBA-OLE adapter allows integration to PC desktop applications. Other commercial software can access CORBA network objects in the information architecture through vendor API’s.