Title: NAMT Framework/SIMA Integration Project

Staff: (7 staff years) Edward Barkmeyer, NEIL CHRISTOPHER, *Alcan Donmez, Howard Moncarz, *Steve Osella, *David Sauder, *Harry Scott, Kate Senehi, Selden Stewart, Evan Wallace, *Ted Vorburger

Project Objective: Contribute to U.S. industrial competitiveness by working with industry to develop standards for the integration of engineering design, planning, and production software systems. This project will accomplish its objective by collaborating with related projects to develop system integration specifications, information models, and reference software implementations. The project will promote the results of its collaborations into formal standards processes.

MEL Thrust(s) Supported: Manufacturing Systems Integration.

Need Addressed: In response to marketplace demands, U.S. manufacturing enterprises are taking competitive advantage of geographically diverse resources by forming strategic partnerships and distributing manufacturing operations. The NAMT Framework project will prototype a manufacturing software system that supports distributed design engineering, manufacturing engineering, production engineering, and production operations for discrete parts manufacturing. This prototype will be based on emerging infrastructure technologies that are likely candidates for international standardization. It will be the experimental basis for further development of standards and specifications. The standards and specifications will focus manufacturing specific information that is exchanged between manufacturing systems, The prototype, standards, and specifications will be used by the U.S. manufacturing community in the creation distributed systems tailored to the needs of particular manufacturing enterprises.

Technical Approach: In the project's first development cycle, the prototype will be a distributed system consisting of a shop controller, an inspection workstation controller, a product data management system, an object-oriented database, and a "guardian" interface for monitoring system operations. In the second development cycle the Framework project will add a controller for the NIST Hexapod machine tool and two or more manufacturing engineering software applications such as simulation and process planning. The second development cycle will incorporate links to manufacturing applications located at the site of at least one industry partner. Subsequent development cycles will add design engineering applications, additional links to industry sites and will demonstrate virtual manufacturing in a distributed environment. Industry collaboration, technology transfer, consensus building and standards development will be performed in parallel with the prototype development.

The NAMT Framework project will incorporate prior work performed in NIST's Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory (MEL). The prior work includes the Manufacturing Systems Integration (MSI) project, the Enhanced Machine Control (EMC) project, the Next Generation Inspection System (NGIS) project, the Quality In Automation (QIA) project, and the Systems Integration of Manufacturing Applications (SIMA) program. The NAMT Framework project will collaborate with the NAMT Hexapod project and the NAMT Machine Tool Performance project. This project will also share technical deliverables with the National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocol (NIIIP) program, the Technologies Enabling Agile Manufacturing (TEAM) program, and the Sematech Computer Integrated Manufacturing Applications Framework (CIM-F) project.

The NAMT Framework project will employ the Object Management Group's (OMG) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) to describe the interfaces and implement the communications among the software components. It will work through the OMG's Manufacturing Task Force (MfgTF) and the Real-time Special Interest Group to build consensus on issues relating to distributed manufacturing systems. This project will work through ISO Technical Committee 184 Sub-committee 4 (ISO TC184/SC4) on issues relating to product data modeling, representation, and exchange. It will work through ISO Technical Committee 184 Sub-committee 5 (ISO TC184/SC5) on issues relating to manufacturing enterprise architectures.

FY95 Accomplishments:

• Developed the Technical Corrigendum of the Draft International Standard ISO 10303 Part 21, Standard Data Access Interface (SDAI).
• Completed the final edits to ISO 11404 Language Independent Datatypes and transmitted to Geneva for publication.
• Performed baseline testing of Object Request Brokers over the wide area network for use in distributed manufacturing system in collaboration with the Software Engineering Institute.
• Prototyped a distributed object system of Sandia design analysis software by employing CORBA based tools in collaboration with the Software Engineering Institute and Sandia National Laboratory.
• Completed the "SIMA Reference Architecture - Part 1 Activity Model" for industry review and publication.
• Collaborated with on the development on a generic controller shell and messaging with the NIST Joint Control Architecture project.
• Hosted NIST Architect's Roundtable workshop of participants from national consortia and began working toward convergence of architectural concepts and essential standards.

FY96 Plans:

• Prototype a distributed manufacturing system consisting of manufacturing equipment controllers, manufacturing engineering software, and information management systems by employing object technology, pre-standard information models, message models, and interface designs.
• Develop new pre-standard models of manufacturing information for part measurement and quality control operations using inspection workstations and related equipment.
• Evaluate the opportunities to generalize the Sematech CIM Framework into the discrete parts manufacturing domain by analyzing the equipment controller messaging model, the manufacturing information models, the interface specifications, and the underlying communications model.
• Participate in the Object Management Group Manufacturing Task Force to evaluate and promote manufacturing specific common object facilities.
• Convene the second NIST Architect's Roundtable and a NIST conference on CIM Frameworks for the manufacturing industry.
• Related Developments: 1) Completion of the Sematech Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM-F) Application Framework Specification version 1.3 and CIM-F C++ Reference Implementation. 2) Establishment of the OMG Manufacturing Task Force to accommodate the manufacturing industry's requirements of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). NIST's membership into the OMG. 3) Establishment of the TEAM Integration Thrust group effort in developing consensus on a framework for distributed manufacturing systems. 4) Announcement of the NIST ATP TIMA program awards.