Supporting the Information Management of Control Activities in a CIM Shop Floor Environment

A CIM shopfloor environment can be supported by a collection of different activities, such as design, manufacturing, marketing, etc. Every activity may consist of a number of subactivities where a subactivity can be performed and represented by several agents. The “agents” are de- scribed here as components that perform activities through executing their specific “tasks”. So far, for DCS (Distributed Control Systems), manufacturers have resolved the “information management”, “information sharing” and “control” problems, through purchasing all instruments and control equipments from the same supplier. In real applications however, both within the CAC activity (among its sub-activities) and in relations among the CAC activity and other CIM activities, the industrial processes define differently formatted data, for instance the discrete and continuous variables that need to be shared among several multivendor control equipments. Therefore, the information sharing and management and the control problems are still the difficult technological problems without an integral solution. This paper focuses on the Computer Aided Control (CAC) activity and describes some agents involved in process control and the tasks that they perform. Furthermore, an architecture is described to support the information management requirements for agents’ cooperation in a CIM shopfloor environment. This information management architecture is then applied to the definition of cooperating CAC agents.