An object-oriented framework for enterprise modelling

Computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) is the process of organizing manufacturing companies under the control of a common information system to enhance their competitiveness. To achieve this result models are needed to identify activities, data and resources of an enterprise and to create the right relationships between them. Presently several international standardization bodies are pursuing the objective to define a commonly accepted reference model and development methodology for CIM systems. From the analysis of the proposals a great affinity emerges between these standardization efforts and the techniques commonly adopted in the realm of software engineering to describe a software development process exploiting an object oriented (OO) paradigm. This paper reviews, in particular, the main results of two international activities in the field of CIM standardization, analysing and harmonizing the different proposals in the light of OO techniques. Finally, the authors propose a pattern of classes of objects for the design of CIM systems that answers to the need of a unifying framework discussing in detail an example of application of the solution proposed