AN OBJECT-ORIENTED INFORMATION MODELING METHODOLOGY FOR MANUFACTURING INFORMATION-SYSTEMS

In this paper, we propose a new information modeling methodology for manufacturing information systems, called OOMIS (Object-Oriented modeling methodology for Manufacturing Information Systems). The proposed methodology consists of an analysis phase and a design phase. In the analysis phase, manufacturing functions are decomposed into component functions to define the information flow among the manufacturing functions and their infrastructures. The manufacturing functions am described with functional diagrams. Then, functional diagrams are transformed into three types of tables: function, data, and operation tables. In the design phase, these tables are translated into an object-oriented information model. The information model consists of a class dictionary and class relationship diagrams. Through an aggregation and integration process, these tables are transformed into a class dictionary which consists of function classes and entity classes. The function classes describe manufacturing functions and the entity classes describe manufacturing data. The class relationships (generalization, aggregation, and interaction) are defined in the semantic design process. The integrated information model supports semantic properties of the manufacturing information and can be directly translated into a specific data dictionary for OODBMS.