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Distributed computer integrated manufacturing systems (CIM) developed by integrating commercial and off-the-shelf software components, have to fulfil the needs of flexibility required by the end-users and the production line itself. A software architecture designed for a product family and standard interface technologies are a good basis for extendible and scalable systems that can be connected to factory management systems. In our approach an object-oriented technology is used to increase flexibility and reuse in a product family of manufacturing execution systems (MES). The CORBA technology for transparent communication and a legacy system with application-specific CORBA wrappers provide the interoperability necessary for heterogeneous manufacturing systems. The event-driven behaviour of MES applications is supported by an active database based on a commercial CORBA implementation and an object-oriented database.
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Niemelä et al. (2002) studied this question.
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