Design and Implementation of a CORBA-based Reconfigurable Software System for Distributed Manufacturing

摘要

Global competition and rapidly changing market demands have forced manufacturing companies to change the production style and configuration of manufacturing organizations. Owing to the trend of using the computer aided technology in manufacturing, providing global network service has become the key factor to survive in the changing market. Current CAD/CAM systems are usually designed to operate in an isolated environment and are unable to communicate with each other. Therefore, the communication and collaboration as well as integration of the manufacturing environments are often limited. To enhance the advantage of the dispersed department and personnel among various enterprises, the use of network to communicate and exchange information can greatly improve the production efficiency. Moreover, manufacturing system should accommodate various kinds of demands of production condition and functional operation in the tendency of upgrading the products constantly. The above system structure must response the changeability and reconfigurability in time to effectively use the components and equipments in the engineering activities. In this research, a reconfigurable software platform for distributed manufacturing is proposed to cope with various engineering activities such as concept design, part machining and inspection. The proposed system is developed based on the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) standard and client-server technologies. The developed architecture, a prototype implementation and some preliminary test results are described in this paper. The proposed system is designed on the basis of modular concept and distributed environment so that the various manufacturing activities at different sites can be integrated and reconfigured rapidly on the Internet to adapt to the changing demands of customer requirements.