Establishment of the model for flexible manufacturing system based on CORBA and IDEF0

Integrated Integration Definition Language (IDEF0) is an activity-based modelling technique for modelling the activities and information flows in a manufacturing system. Based on the entities involved in the system and the interactions abstracted from IDEF0 approach, an object-oriented method based on Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is developed in a hierarchically distributed control system. The application of CORBA as a middleware for the development of distributed object systems simplifies the implementation of clients and servers at different locations. The data and general methods in distributed controllers are integrated into servers; the controller is able to communicate with the server through the communication mechanism of CORBA. A prototype system which is constructed to validate the flexible manufacturing system is presented in details.