Control tasks for industrial processes on the shopfloor are defined by differently formatted data, for instance both discrete and continuous variables need to be shared and exchanged among several multivendor control equipments. One solution to the problem of control of 'information management' and 'information sharing' is to purchase all devices and control equipments from the same supplier. In real applications however, it is difficult and often impossible to take this solution for Computer Aided Control (CAC). Similarly, in a broader spectrum, considering the independently developed legacy systems, the solution of the same vendor equipment and software tools cannot be applied to support the interrelations among the CIM activities involved in concurrent engineering such as design, manufacturing and marketing. Information sharing and information management for control activities are still difficult technological problems without an integral solution. This paper focuses on the CAC activity and its subactivities within a balanced automated system, where a subactivity can be performed and represented by a number of agents. The "agents" are described here as components that perform activities through executing their specific "tasks". First, several example agents involved in process control are described and their specific tasks identified. Then a federated architecture is defined to support the information management requirements and the cooperation of these agents in a CIM shopfloor environment. Although in this paper the suggested information management architecture is only applied to the CAC activities, it is also described that similar approach can be applied to all other CIM activities.
Integrated CIM activities, Computer Aided Control activities, Federated Information Management architecture
All articles published by Studies in Informatics and Control (SIC) are published in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).