INFORMATION MODELING FOR MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS - A CASE-STUDY

This paper addresses the information-modeling issue for SAIL 1, an int egrated shopfloor manufacturing system with flexible manufacturing and material-handling capabilities at the City University of Hong Kong. B ased on analyses of the system configuration and information flow stru cture of SAIL 1, this paper presents a data-modeling strategy to model its information system from the system-physical configuration, system -operation control and system-operation monitoring, respectively. By u sing the IDEF1x methodology to abstract, classify and define the infor mation objects and the interrelationships between them, three semantic data models were constructed in accordance with the system requiremen ts and modeling strategy, from which the internal and external schemat a of the SAIL 1 information system can be derived correspondingly. Cop yright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.