Distributed system infrastructure for a prolific manufacturing enterprise

A prolific manufacturing enterprise can tolerate changes in the structure of information describing the enterprise-it is complex, dynamic, evolving, and constantly accessible as it adapts to the changing requirements and current status of the real world. The computational infrastructure for existing manufacturing enterprises only supports changing data about manufacturing. The author proposes a more comprehensive distributed system infrastructure that also supports change and evolution in the structure of information. This infrastructure is based on `proxies´ which are used as the lowest level distributed system building blocks to represent all aspects of the enterprise-including machines, programs, and people. Proxies implement basic distributed services including (1) naming, locating and advertising, (2) monitoring/control, and (3) program exchange/execution. Preliminary results from a prototype implementation are presented