Distributed Open Manufacturing Environment (DOME): A manufacturing controller integration toolkit

Modern computer controlled manufacturing systems demand tight integration between machines distributed across the factory floor. Despite wide industry demand for simple and powerful integration between heterogeneous machines, such capabilities are still missing from current systems. The objective of this paper is to describe a toolkit, the Distributed Open Manufacturing Environment (DOME), that will allow developers to easily create such a system. The toolkit builds upon the standardized Java Platform and Java Jini distributed system. A reference implementation will be created to both Drove the DOME toolkit, as well as to investigate novel distributed control methods.