Manufacturing Communication： DCOM-MMS-based Approach for Flexible Manufacturing System

A design approach of manufacturing communication ispresented for flexible manufacturing system in this paper.The primary objective aims at making the flexible manufacturing control system provided with interoperability and rconfigurability.Based on describing manufacturing message specification (MMS) and distributed component object model (DCOM), a client/server manufacturing communication model is built with MMS standard and DCOM middleware, and thecommunication interfaces between MMS client and MMS server are designed with Microsoft interface definition language (MIDL) and abstract syntax notation one (ASN. 1) of MMS services. As a result, DCOM and MMS integration leads to such client/ server communication capabilities independent of different operating systems and manufacturing devices in flexible manufacturing automation environment. Finally, to verify the new design approach, a prototype system of robot control system has been implemented in MS 2000 Server/Professional Operating System and VC + + 6.0 Developer Environments.