CCE: the CIME computing environment

Application integration platforms provide services for sharing data and synchronizing the operation of applications. Such platforms must hide the heterogeneity of hardware or operating systems, offer simple application programming interfaces and hide the diversity of communication protocols used to access data. The CCE platform is presented, specifically designed for shop floor control in a manufacturing environment. CCE offers two categories of services called application dependent and independent services which allow manipulation of objects such as pallets, tools or programs in a simple way. These services are presented and illustrated by examples of a variable and a mould object. Internally, CCE is implemented as a set of servers which can be distributed in the factory and communicate with one another using a software bus based on remote procedure calls or CORBA. Development of CCE continues with the study of how to integrate the CCE and EXPRESS object models.