VMS (virtual manufacturing system) may be defined as a transparent interface /control mechanism to support human decision-making via simulation and monitoring of real operating situation through modeling of all activities in RMS (real manufacturing system). The three main layers in a VMS are business process layer, manufacturing execution layer, and facility operation layer, and each layer is represented by a specific software system having its own input modeler module. The current version of these input modelers has been implemented based on its own "local" framework, and as a result, there are no information sharing mechanism, nor a common user view among them.
Proposed in the thesis is a unified modeler framework covering the three VMS layers, in which the concept of PPR (product-process-resource) model is employed as a common semantics framework and a 2D graphic network model is used as a syntax framework. For this purpose, abstract classes PPRObject and GraphicObject are defined for the PPR-model and 2D graphic network model, respectively, and then a subclass is inherited from the abstract class for each application layer. This feature would make it easier to develop and maintain the individual software systems.
In the proposed modeler framework, XML is used as a common data format. Since the model description data is required to follow existing standard schema, the XML schema from WfMC which is a final draft version standard for the business process layer is used as the common data format. And this thesis proposed XML schema definitions which are draft version standards for the other two layers. This feature allows information sharing among different layers.
