Functional Interaction Management: A Requirement for Software Interoperability

There is a much increased demand for a degree of interworking between software packages as it is no longer reasonable to expect a single application to be able to do its job without support or reference to data and events that are handled by other closely related application systems. In practice, it is essential to help ensure and maintain discipline and harmony to enable graceful co-operation among interoperating software components. Functional interaction management is identified as a vital service requirement necessary to help address this issue of software interoperability. Current manufacturing control systems (MCS) exhibit deficiencies and constraints that inhibit or complicate their interaction. This paper reports on ongoing research work where the main thrust is to derive a new generation of reconfigurable and modular forms of MCS, the components of which can ‘functionally interact’ and share common information through accessing distributed data repositories in an efficient, changeable and standardized manner. The emphasis is on: (a) development of an effective framework to manage functional interaction between MCS components, which typically may comprise software packages that facilitate production planning, product design, finite capacity scheduling and cell control; (b) ‘soft’ integration of these MCS components over the CIM-BIOSYS integrating infrastructure.