MKS - A CONCEPTUALLY CENTRALIZED KNOWLEDGE SERVICE FOR DISTRIBUTED CIM ENVIRONMENTS

The Manufacturing Knowledge System (MKS) uses a uniform representation of manufacturing knowledge, in combination with uniform access to that knowledge in a distributed environment, to provide a comprehensive computational framework for manufacturing. MKS should be viewed as a meta-CIM system, whose goal is to tie together existing CIM systems and other resources of a large manufacturing enterprise, not to duplicate their functionality. At the core of MKS is a conceptually centralized, object-oriented model containing information that is common to many applications. The model is connected to existing CIM systems, to equipment and to databases which supply up-to-date information about the status of engineering and manufacturing processes. Application modules access the CIM data and each other's services using language independent knowledge service protocols that insulate them from details such as where data or services reside, and how they are called. MKS itself is designed to be both scalable and efficient. It has a distributed implementation that allows incremental growth and robust operation in large and dynamic enterprises. Changing information is communicated to application modules that have registered their interests with the model by means of a message based notification mechanism. The focus in this paper is on the system-level features of the current implementation of MKS. Examples from the domain of semiconductor manufacturing are used to illustrate real world applications.