Information design for SAIL 1

SAIL 1 at City University of Hong Kong is to be developed into an integrated manufacturing system with flexible manufacturing and material handling capabilities. To meet the life-cycle requirements of SAIL 1 from preliminary design through the system implementation and operation, CIM-OSA methodology is being used to define its top-down integration strategy and formulate the bottom-up development tactics. Based on brief analyses about the system configuration and information flow structure of SAIL 1, this paper presents a data modelling strategy to model its information system, which organizes the information resources from the system physical configuration, system operation control and system operation monitoring, respectively. By using a CIM-OSA approach to abstract, classify and define the object views and enterprise objects for the information view of the SAIL 1 system at the requirement definition level, an object-oriented semantic data model was constructed in accordance with the system requirements and data modelling strategy, from which the conceptual schema for the future information system of SAIL 1 can be derived. © 1996 Taylor & Francis Ltd.