by Richard Bolton
Abstract
This article describes the NIIIP Consortium, its mission, and technical vision. It provides an overview of the NIIIP reference architecture and its features. It highlights the key state-of-the-art elements of the NIIIP solution, the NIIIP spiral development plan, and the NIIIP deliverables. It summaries the Consortium’s accomplishments and future plans. Project information is available at http://www.niiip.org.
1. Introduction
In today’s fast-changing global marketplace, manufacturing organizations need to align themselves closely with both their suppliers and customers. Product cycle times are no longer measured in months and years but in days and weeks. Timeliness and responsiveness are just as important to business success, as are quality, and cost requirements.
Today, the incompatibility of the information technology used by manufacturing organizations, suppliers, customers, and associates, is the major inhibitor to close alignment with new customers and suppliers and to the reduction of cycle times. The goal of the NIIIP project is to solve this incompatibility within Virtual Enterprises and allow organizations to collaborate with each other regardless of data structures, processes, or computing environments.
2. What is the NIIIP?
The NIIIP Consortium consists of a group of thirteen leading United States information technology suppliers and users with a common interest in developing a software architecture and providing technologies to enable Virtual Enterprises. Virtual Enterprises are temporary consortia or alliances of companies formed to exploit fast-changing opportunities. The NIIIP Consortium is national in scope and its members bring a wealth of experience and technology to support Virtual Enterprises. Together with the Federal Government, they share costs and skills to create the necessary infrastructure to support Virtual Enterprises across the United States (This research is sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency under ARPA Order No. B761-00 and managed by the United States Air Force under contract F33615-94-2-4447).
NIIIP Consortium Members include: CAD Framework Initiative, Digital Equipment Corp., Enterprise Integration Technologies, General Dynamics - Electric Boat Division, IBM, International TechneGroup Inc. (ITI), Lockheed Aeronautical Systems, Magavox Electronic Systems, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, STEP Tools Inc., UES Inc., and the University of Florida.
2.1 Mission and Technical Vision
NIIIP’s mission is to enable U.S. Industrial Virtual Enterprises to provide globally competitive products, services, and solutions cost-effectively and in a timely manner — regardless of organization, geographic and technical boundaries or company size — and to make U.S. manufacturing the global standard that other nations try to emulate.
NIIIP’s 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. NIIIP focuses on establishing a computer system infrastructure that: makes Virtual Enterprise collaborative computing pervasive among U.S. manufacturers; provides state-of-the-art software technologies to allow participants to effectively collaborate; allows companies within Virtual Enterprises to share costs and skills, and access global markets with each participant contributing its core expertise.
2.2 Reference Architecture
The technology requirements of Industrial Virtual Enterprises include: common communication protocols, a uniform object technology base for system and application inter-operability, common information model specifications and exchange, and cooperative management of integrated Virtual Enterprise processes.
The NIIIP reference architecture is distributed, open and non-proprietary software infrastructure that enables Virtual Enterprises to integrate resources and technologies into a production system. As shown in Figure 1, "NIIIP Technology Components," NIIIP is integrating the technologies from four communities to enable the proliferation of Virtual Enterprises across the United States.
NIIIP furthers the adoption and convergence of existing standards and the definition of new ones by working with standards organization such as: the International Standards Organization’s Standard for the Exchange of Product Data (ISO STEP), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the CAD Framework Initiative (CFI), Work Flow Management Coalition (WFMC), Object Management Group (OMG), and others.
As shown in Figure 2, "The NIIIP Infrastructure," the NIIIP component protocols consist of a set of thirteen components, their interrelations, and mutual obligations, that allow the formation of various kinds of Virtual Enterprises depending on how many components are selected. These thirteen NIIIP components are packaged into five subsystems positioned across three layers. Currently, a set of system protocols are in the process of being defined that capture common behavior across components and represent a Virtual Enterprise model with both build-time and run-time protocols.
The NIIIP components consist of classes and objects that are described in terms of an amalgam of object modeling paradigms taken mainly from standard sources:
- Interface (CORBA IDL)
- Info Model (ISO STEP EXPRESS)
- Rules (Event, Condition, Action)
- Constraints (EXPRESS)
- Associations (OMG Relationship Service, OSAM*, etc.)
In Layer I, the user layer or wrapping services layer, end-user applications interface to the NIIIP environment. Layer II, the middle-ware or coordination service layer, provides services to Layer I applications. Layer III, the mediation services layer, provides services to Layers I and II.
The Project Control subsystem consists of Desktop and Agent components. These represent the Virtual Enterprise control function for the end-user or end-user surrogate. The Virtual Enterprise services subsystem contains the design and collaboration tools. They represent the data function for the end-user.
The Task and Session subsystem controls work within the Virtual Enterprise. They might share resources distributed across enterprise boundaries and through various firewalls. The Knowledge and Rules Management subsystem provides the monitoring of Virtual Enterprise rules that allow inter-enterprise resource sharing. The Layer III Decision Support subsystem components help to resolve faulty requests, provide for the acquisition of new knowledge, and provide for negotiation between agents in dispute.
2.3 Components
The thirteen NIIIP components are summarized in Table 1. Internal to each component are one or more objects (OMG “interfaces”). No single NIIIP-compliant product will likely support all the behaviors specified by the thirteen components. Many products will, however, function as instances of NIIIP-compliant classes generated during the NIIIP conformance testing process.
NIIIP will make its architecture public, and will deploy its technologies nationwide so that organizations can adopt the technology and apply it to their particular situations.
2.4 State-of-the-art Technology
The NIIIP protocols provide an infrastructure for the inter-operation of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products in the industrial domain.
In the NIIIP environment, resources of member organizations such as database systems, product data files, expert systems, application systems, are uniformly modeled as components in an object-oriented framework. Key elements of the NIIIP solution include:
- the NIIIP Common Language (NCL) that allows Virtual Enterprise implementors to model resources and associated protocols. This language is an optional superset of DMG IDL and ISO EXPRESS and can be used directly,
- a distributed Virtual Enterprise monitor for ensuring that business and security rules are enforced,
- middleware for secure Internet access and inter-operability across firewalls,
- NIIIP tools for uniform real and simulated work management solutions to allow Virtual Enterprise members to pre-plan and validate the flow of information and sequence appropriate technical and business review processes that support the manufacturing cycle, and
- protocols for mediated and negotiated data and process interchanges based on the Virtual Enterprise knowledge base.
2.5 Spiral Development
To minimize technical risks, NIIIP’s spiral development plan includes iterative development, incremental increases in function, and use of rapid prototyping tools.
The NIIIP consortium, as show in Figure 3, "NIIIP Tasks," has twelve tasks. Its Reference Architecture drives the development of Protocols that allow experimentation with various subsets of the technology across the Internet. Protocols allow the construction of commercial, defense, and research pilots. The Consortium will accelerate standards, deployment, and commercialization.
3. NIIIP Accomplishments and Plans
Cycle 1
During this cycle, NIIIP instantiated its protocols with emphasis on Task, Session, Workflow and Data (including STEP) Management with CORBA over the Internet. The Consortium demonstrated the initial infrastructure and documented the experiences learned. These experiences are incorporated into subsequent NIIIP Cycles.
Cycle 2
During this cycle, NIIIP will partially implement its protocols — component and system — with emphasis on the Knowledge Base, Monitor, Mediation, and Agents with CORBA over the Internet. Workflow and ORB interoperability will also be included.
Cycle 3
During this cycle, NIIIP intends to complete an implementation of the protocols defined during cycles 1 and 2. This includes the use of both system and component protocols.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to recognize the following individuals for their help in the preparation of this article: Esther Odescalchi, Art Goldschmidt, Alex Putman, and David Zenie.
Richard Bolton
National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols (NIIIP) Consortium
1055 Washington Boulevard
Stamford, CT 06901
director@niiip.org
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The RASSP Digest - Vol. 3, 1st. Qtr. 1996
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