ARCHITECTURAL ISSUES IN THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN INTEGRATED TOOLKIT FOR MANUFACTURING ENGINEERING

The integration of commercial off-the-shelf manufacturing engineering tools to produce a manufacturing engineering toolkit is described. The se issues are considered by describing the work taking place in an ong oing project to develop such a toolkit. In particular, the approach be ing taken towards integration of the tools is described, concentrating on the architecture of the solution that is being developed. To this end the paper highlights four main areas: the strengths and weaknesses of an initial prototype toolkit being used as input to the project; t he approach being used to describe the architecture of the integrated toolkit; the details of the main elements of a preliminary architectur e for the toolkit; and some issues being faced in moving from an archi tecture to a working implementation that can be used in practice. As a result, the main contributions include a survey of the key issues fac ing designers of integrated toolkits from the manufacturing domain, an analysis of architectural alternatives for building integrated toolki ts, and an illustration of choices that have been made in this regard for satisfying the requirements for a manufacturing engineering toolki t.