An Intelligent Translation Layer for Legacy CIM Applications

During the last two decades, software to support the manufacturing lifecycle has become pervasive. Sophisticated off the shelf packages are available for most standard manufacturing activities such as MRP, inventory control and dynamic scheduling. Unfortunately, most of this software has been developed in isolation by independent vendors and does not interoperate well with other independently developed packages. This can often be problematic since the manufacturing environment is too multifaceted for a single vendor to provide a total solution, making data exchange and integration a necessary if unpleasant fact of life in Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) environments. What is required to enable this installed base of "legacy" applications to interoperate with new standards based processing models is a meta translation layer which we have named the Intelligent Translation Layer (ITL). The purpose of the ITL is to provide a migration path between the current "islands of automation" model of industrial computing and a fully integrated, object oriented CIM environment such as that envisioned in the Semetech CIM Application Framework. The purpose of this Phase I effort is to define a detailed architecture for a data translation layer that embodies the necessary functional requirements as outlined in the proposal. Phase II will expand upon the Phase I work to produce a working prototype of the ILT and a demonstration using one or more "live" applications. Commercialization potential for such a tool is essentially unlimited.