A hypermanager for a computer integrated concurrent process engineering environment

As one of the most important issues in the development of a computer integrated concurrent process engineering environment, this paper first draws the system requirements into data browsing and tool access management. A hyper-manager is then designed which introduces hyper-objects as front end. These hyper-objects are hyper-linked with system objects and support tools locally or remotely which are configured in a multi-dimensional object-oriented information model (MDOOM) and a concurrent tasking activity model. The MDOOM allows switching the information and support tools between different dimensions and the activity model maintains the tool availability to prevent conflicts. Integrated with WWW, the hyper-manager allows browsing both local and remote data and carrying out multiple tasks. A prototype system implemented in Tc1/Tk linking with Prolog has demonstrated a desirable functionality.