An architectural view to computer integrated manufacturing systems based on Axiomatic Design Theory

The emergence of the globalization paradigm in manufacturing industry has changed the markets' circumstances, and accordingly manufacturing systems need to be compatibilized with these situations. There are many solutions to assist manufacturing systems for this purpose. Computerized systems and their related solutions were being the most attractive ones for manufacturing systems in recent decade. Developing such systems and exploiting from the advantages of such solutions requires a consistent foundation. Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) emerged as a philosophy to provide such foundation, and to assist the computerized manufacturing solutions. Despite of the high potentials of the CIM philosophy, the related works lack in many aspects. The absence of a thorough look to exploit the high potentials of the CIM philosophy to consider different aspects of the manufacturing systems, and the complexity which exists in the nature of the designing of such systems are the major concerns. These concerns lead us to afford them fundamentally with an architectural view. The architectural view of the paper is because of architectures are the basis for designing and future development of the systems, and synthesizing solutions that satisfy the system requirements. Accordingly, the architecture of the system is considered as a basis for creating desired changes and resolving the mentioned concerns. Therefore, the paper proposes a layered architecture which covers five critical aspects of a CIM system. Physical, Functional, Managerial, Informational, and Control aspects are the five critical aspects which are assigned to five layers of the architecture. The manipulated architecture assists manufacturing systems to audit their Physical, Functional, Managerial, Informational, and Control aspects based on a proposed set of ISO standards in order to compatibilize and align themselves with the necessities of the globalized manufacturing industry. The layered architecture expected to be well-structured and to resolve the concerns. The expectations have been investigated through a promising tool for designing and analyzing complex systems, known as Axiomatic Design (AD) Theory. The AD-based design and analysis are according to two axioms, known as Independence Axiom and Information Axiom. Moreover, the AD Theory approaches have been used to reach a set of standard guidelines for exploring and achieving realization operands for the architecture. By analyzing the results with the AD Theory axioms, appropriateness of the design has been approved. Finally, a roadmap for future works is delineated.