An Object-Oriented Approach to Computer Integrated Systems

In recent years computers have been incorporated into large scale systems such as nuclear plant, flight control, and manufacturing systems. Such Computer Integrated Systems (CIS) normally consist of heterogeneous subsystems. The integration of heterogeneous subsystems requires that the subsystems be portable, inter-operable, and integrable at both software and hardware levels so that the integrated system should function properly. Objects and nets are proposed as the atomic elements of CIS's. An object is defined as a computational model of an arbitrary entity. Then three representation schemes of an object are introduced: algebraic, modular, and graphical. Two operations on objects, Composition and Union, are introduced as means of combining two objects into a larger one. As an application of this approach, a Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) system is represented as a network of objects.