Information system design for optical fibre manufacturing using an object-oriented approach
Ching-Yang Wang, Robert E. Fulton · International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing · 1994
This paper describes an object-oriented approach to designing an information system which supports the engineering and production information needs of optical fibre manufacturing* *This paper is an extension of a paper presented at the International Conference on Object-Oriented Manufacturing Systems, Calgary, Alberta Canada, May 3-6 1992 (Wang et al. 1992a). . The resulting prototype information system was developed at the Material Handling Research Center in the USA. This object-oriented approach follows these steps: understanding the layout of the optical fibre manufacturing processes, defining the information system requirements, developing object-oriented models, and implementing a prototype information system in the Smalltalk environment. In order to evaluate this object-oriented approach, this paper describes and compares similarities and differences with an earlier relational approach. The results indicate that the object-oriented approach provides a superset of the functionality contained in the relational approach. Specifically, beyond the inclusion of manufacturing data, the object-oriented approach captures the operations that are performed on the data.