Collaborative Object-Oriented Analysis for Production Control Systems

Impact of business process re-engineering requires the fundamental rethinking of how information systems are analyzed and designed. It is no longer sufficient to establish a monolithic system for fixed business environments. Information systems must be adaptive in nature. This demand is also applied in production domain. Enabling concept for the adaptive information system is reusability. This paper presents a new object-oriented analysis process for creating such reusable software components in production domain, especially for production planning and scheduling. Our process called MeCOMA is based on three meta-models: physical object meta-model, data object meta-model, and activity object meta-model. After the three meta-models are extended independently for a given production system, they are collaboratively integrated on the basis of integration pattern. The main advantages of MeCOMA are (1) to reduce software development time and (2) to consistently build reusable production software components.