Information system for production engineering: Contribution to maintaining consistency of composite data using an object-oriented approach

The coordination of companies' increasing activities to form a set of synergistic elements relies on the control of information exchanged and shared by various means (methods, tools, models). There are standardized solutions (CIMOSA, GRAI, PERA . ..) that propose an approach based on the preliminary definition of a general model, and which uses a reference architecture model. Using specialization, this reference model can be adapted to particular systems. This integration approach is well adapted to the design of consistent models of production systems. However, the integration of preexisting models with regard to the reference models is difficult. An integration approach is proposed starting from the specific models of the domain experts. This approach is based on object-oriented metamodelling of the expert models and subsequently on the integration of all the obtained metamodels. The language used to express the metamodels is UML (Unified Modelling Language). However, before the integration, the metamodels must be consistent with regard to the expert model semantics. The paper presents an overview of the integration approach and shows how the extensibility of the mechanisms proposed in UML can be used to define specific constraints contained in the expert models.