Model building with Core Manufacturing Simulation Data

The Core Manufacturing Simulation Data (CMSD) data interface standard created by NIST was developed to facilitate the exchange of manufacturing data between disparate manufacturing software applications including process planning systems and discrete event simulation tools. An Applications Programming Interface (API) was created for abstracting away the implementation details of reading and writing CMSD files to/from computer memory. This paper will detail the API structure and the structures of several translators which use the CMSD API. A simple case study will show the results of translating a CMSD file into several different simulation packages.