Evan K. Wallace

A situated evaluation of the Object Management Group's (OMG) Object Management Architecture (OMA)

It has been difficult to objectively assess the real value or maturity of the Object Management Groups Object Management Architecture (OMA). While experience reports have appeared in the literature, these have focused more on the functionality of the end-system than on systematically exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the OMA, and providing practical guidelines on the effective use of the OMA for specific software-engineering problems. In this paper we describe a case study in the use of the OMA to integrate legacy software components into a distributed object system. We assess the OMA in this problem context, and indicate strengths and weaknesses of the specification and current implementations. We extrapolate our experience to a broader class of component-based software systems, and recommend an architectural strategy for the effective use of the OMA to this class of systems.

The Industrial Ontologies Foundry Proof-of-Concept Project

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up.

Toward Manufacturing System Composability Analysis: A Use Case Scenario

Smart manufacturing system will be able to quickly adapt to new and changing requirements, implying that software and hardware components of the manufacturing system need to be easily recomposed. In addition, provision of software applications and components is trending toward distributed, heterogeneous, and cloud-based. However, engineers who need to compose a software system will have difficulty finding and using software components with the right functionality and compatibility without a standard to describe these software components. This paper identifies the need for a reference functional ontology to provide a common way to describe a software component functionality. Such an ontology would lead towards the needed standard to describe the software components. The objective of this paper is to discuss high-level requirements for such a functional ontology and provide an initial use case to illustrate how the functional ontology may enable composability analysis.

CIM Framework Experience Report for 1996

The National Advanced Manufacturing Testbed (NAMT) Framework prototype is a distributed, object-oriented manufacturing system that serves as a testbed and trial implementation for emerging industry-developed speci cations. This report documents the ndings of the Framework team in 1996 with respect to version 1.3 of SEMATECHs CIM Framework (CIMF).