This edition of the The RASSP Digest is focused upon the RASSP efforts to develop the enterprise integration infrastructure necessary to support collaborative design in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. This infrastructure is vital to enable the rapid formation of virtual organizations so important to business and the Department of Defense (DoD) today.
To achieve the enterprise integration objective of electronically enabling virtual collocation in time and space, four sets of related problems must be addressed.
By solving these three sets of related problems, new capabilities are enabled that represent services that an enterprise integration framework can provide. These services include capabilities such as workflow management systems, enterprise product data management systems either stand-alone or integrated with a workflow management system, and enterprise library management systems.
Lastly, there are numerous business and cultural issues that must be addressed to allow the effective application of enterprise integration technologies like those being developed on RASSP. The RASSP Education & Facilitation program is working to overcome these business and cultural barriers.
To cover the enterprise integration area, a collection of five papers has been assembled. The first two papers present the efforts of the RASSP prime contractors. The first paper, Integrated Process Control and Data Management in RASSP Enterprise Systems, by John Welsh, et. al. of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories' (LM-ATL) RASSP team, describes the LM-ATL enterprise system, highlighting the components that make up that system and presenting a strategy by which the services provided by this enterprise framework can improve efficiency in task execution and information management. The second paper, Enterprise Integration, by James Chieks of the Lockheed Sanders RASSP team, highlights many of the technical and business/cultural difficulties involved in achieving enterprise integration. These two papers by the RASSP primes are followed by two invited papers which help to present a comprehensive view of the enterprise integration area. The first of these invited papers, The National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols (NIIIP) Project, by Richard Bolton of the NIIIP Project, presents an overview of this important, ARPA funded project. The NIIIP technical vision is to define ways for existing applications to inter-operate and to make the technologies fit together in a useful manner based on existing, emerging, and defacto standards such as ISO 10303 (STEP). The next invited paper, Concurrent Engineering Wheels, by Biren Prasad, Managing Editor of the Concurrent Engineering Research and Applications Journal, focuses on the topic of cooperative product development or concurrent engineering. Enabling concurrent engineering is one of the primary benefits provided by enterprise integration. The final paper, Agility through Information Sharing: Results Achieved in a Production Environment, presents the RASSP program’s efforts to develop an agile manufacturing interface utilizing the RASSP enterprise integration capabilities. The results presented in this paper, a 10x reduction in design to manufacturing cycle-time and more than an 80% reduction in rework, highlight the benefits that can be achieved from enterprise integration.
Once again, bon appetit, for there is a lot to Digest in this important issue.
Vijay K. Madisetti
School of Electrical & Computer Engineering,
Georgia Tech.
Atlanta, GA 30332-0250
vkm@ee.gatech.edu
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