Integration Software For An Educational Virtual Laboratory Supervising Flexible Manufacturing Cells

Abstract

Creating and managing virtual enterprises represents the best modern approach for development and training in most business domains. Building such complex entities requires collaboration and integration of diverse hardware systems and software applications. Training software specialists and enterprise managers to design or simply choose the appropriate architecture is a very important and demanding educational task. This paper describes research and development aspects of building a software system for remote supervising and control of a virtual enterprise module. Conceived as a heterogeneous supervisor/control system and using WindowsTM and QNX operating systems as main support and CORBA technology as integration tool, this software system is currently used as part of a complex virtual laboratory developed at the ?Politehnica? University of Bucharest. The system?s main purpose is to allow students at various remote locations to experience mechanisms specific to real-time ope
rating systems, computer-integrated manufacturing, and control systems. By using Internet connections and installing simple client applications, students from other universities can also have access to the virtual enterprise module.