The OPAL platform - a CIMOSA compliant execution environment
The FAW Research Institute has been working on integrating platforms for over 10 years now. The FAW developed an execution environment for heterogeneous distributed systems named AMBAS (Adaptive Method Base Shell). OPAL(2) (Integrated Information and Process Management in Manufacturing Engineering) was a large CEC project that formed part of the AIT-initiative (Advanced Information Technology for the European Automotive and Aerospace Industries). AMBAS has been enhanced in the OPAL project to implement the specification of the AIT-integration platform (AIT-IP). This paper describes how AMBAS also satisfies the requirements of the CIM Open Systems Architecture (CIMOSA)-Integrating Infrastructure (IIS) specification. AMBAS supports enterprise integration based on enterprise models. It provides transparent and uniform access to the entire body of an enterprise's data and methods (functions, services, applications and processes), which is the main aim of CIMOSA-IIS. The application environment Communication and Resource Assistant (CORA: the desktop part of AMBAS) implements a standard Web-based interface to the user. In addition to AMBAS, an enterprise engineering environment (called Omega mega (Operational Modelling Environment and Generator for AMBAS applications)) is available, which makes possible the modelling of data, functions, applications and processes and the generation of corresponding executables for AMBAS. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
execution environment enterprise integration enterprise engineering cimosa-integrating infrastructure data and method base management system ait-ip