During the last two decades, software to support the manufacturing lifecycle has become pervasive. Sophisticated offthe shelf packages are available for most standard manufacturingactivities such MRP, inventory control and dynamic scheduling.Unfortunately, most of this software has been developed inisolation by independent vendors and does not interoperate wellwith other independently developed packages. This can often beproblematic since the manufacturing environment is tomultifaceted for a single vendor to provide a total solution, making data exchange and integration a necessary if unpleasantfact of life in Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM)environments. What is required to enable this installed base of~legacy' applications to interoperate with new standards basedprocessing models is a meta translation layer which we have namedthe Intelligent Translation Layer (ITL). The purpose of the ITLis to provide a migration path between the current "islands ofautomation" model of industrial computing and a fully integrated,object oriented CIM environment such as that envisioned in theSemetech CIM Application Framework. The purpose of this phase Ieffort is to define a detailed architecture for a datatranslation layer that embodies the necessary functionalrequirements as outlined in the proposal. Phase II will expandupon the phase I work to produce a working prototype of the ITLand a demonstration using one or more "live" applications. Commercialization potential for such a tool is essentiallyunlimited.Potential commercial applications of the research:TheIntelligent Translation Layer proposed in this research wouldprovide generic data translation services for any CIM legacyapplications which needed to interoperate with CIM Frameworkbased software.
