REFERENCE MODELS AND OBJECT-ORIENTED METHOD FOR REUSE IN PRODUCTION

The design of the Production Activity Control system (PAC) of a manufa cturing system is a costly and difficult task since it must be adapted to the workshop characteristics and to its environment, Reuse of past experiences and integration of commercial software is a key issue in order to improve the PAC system quality, and in order to decrease the cost and time of its development. In order to fulfil these requirement s two types of tools are necessary: reference models to structure the organisation of the PAC system and software engineering tools to build the PAC system. The object-oriented methods are good candidates to re alise the latter since they are recognised as providing efficient supp ort in order to shorten the code development phases. Moreover, they al low to develop modular and reusable software. Nevertheless, most of th e applications developed in the past years focused on very low level c ontrol structure design, and there is still a lack in supporting tools for the design of complex production activity control architectures, In this paper, we suggest to define modular reference models of PAC mo dules in order to provide a structuring framework for PAC system organ isation specification. Then we use adapted object-oriented techniques to derive the PAC organisation description into a real PAC system. An example, based on a real workshop of AEROSPATIALE and using the FUSION method, is provided.