A framework for object oriented design and prototyping of manufacturing systems

Object-oriented programming, through the use of a library of standard classes and their inheritance relationships, offers a consistent framework to specify, design, and prototype the software architecture of complex discrete event control systems. This work applies such a framework to computer integrated manufacturing, proposing a unified view to represent the hierarchical control structure of a commonly accepted reference model. The results are a library of classes (called G++ and based on the C++ programming language) to express concurrency and to support an extended client server paradigm, and a new design methodology