A distributed internet-based framework for manufacturing planning

Manufacturing organizations worldwide are re-inventing their product development practices in an effort to satisfy changing customer requirements. In the context of these changes influencing the manufacturing community, there is a need to develop frameworks, architectures, and methods to facilitate the creation, implementation, and functioning of virtual enterprises (VEs). This paper presents an Internet-based framework, which supports distributed process planning activities in the context of a VE. Typically, in a VE, the enterprise partners are distributed, and possess diverse skills and heterogeneous software resources, which employ heterogeneous computing platforms. Using the developed approach, physically distributed product development partners can collaborate virtually via the Internet and integrate their life-cycle product development activities through seamless information exchange. In this framework, the distributed manufacturing resources communicate with each other via the Internet inter-ORB protocol (IIOP) using an object request broker (ORB) at each distributed site.