USING A DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR CIM SYSTEM LIFE-CYCLE SUPPORT

The investigation of existing architectures of CIM shop floor control systems has shown that they often fail to give the user a really usable tool. Usabilitity requirements such as ease of utilisation, installation and maintenance are not generally met. High engineering costs are an immediate result of these deficiencies leading to higher system costs and rendering these important tools inaccessible to the industry. INESC Industrial Automation Group has been undertaking R&D work in this field for the last six years, both through european and national projects. The results of one of these european projects ESPRIT Project 5478 Shop-Control, are now being installed in Portugal. The installation of this state-of-the-art tool calls far a considerable though expected effort, since Shop-Control is basically an integrated set of plant floor management tools that need special customisation to meet different shop floor requirements. Moreover, as a state-of-the-art shop floor control architecture, it aims at providing interoperability, integrating existing systems at the shop floor level as well as at management level. Since even state-of-the-art tools should be simple to install and use, a Decision Support System (DSS) supporting future Shop-Control installation teams on their task by allowing some installation automation as well as providing tools to manage the needed interoperability across different platforms, is being developed. Although biased by the Shop-Control and REAL-I-CIM (EP-8865) projects, a genuine effort is being made to make this Decision Support System a generic tool. This paper puts into perspective the relevance of CIM systems decision support, and describes the specification, design and testing of a novel DSS for shop floor CIM systems design, testing and installation.