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Chapter 6: Robot and System Integration
The integration of information among the elements in the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) wheel is illustrated by the enterprise network architecture in the figure below.
Figure: CIM computer architecture
Information flow in three major elements:
1) Product and process definition
2) Manufacturing planning and control
3) Factory automation
All this is supported by Local Area Network (LAN)
The architecture also provides a core of common services for the control data:
1) Communication
2) Management of the data
3) Presentation of the data
The data take three distinct forms:
1) Test data
2) Graphics data
3) Image data
Each data type presents a unique integration problem from the three core services. The degree to which the CIM architecture performs the three core services on all data types is measure of quality of the CIM implementation.