Abstract

This paper presents a predicted target architecture of an integrated manufacturing and management system, based on a metropolitan-type infranet and an industrial process control and monitoring network. Such systems are severely required by prospective users, especially large-scale manufacturing enterprises. Nevertheless, neither big manufacturers of computer integrated manufacturing systems nor big manufacturers of computer integrated systems are apt to develop combined computer integrated manufacturing and management systems. Considering that, a team of volunteer design and research workers initiated some work oriented toward facilitating future development of such combined systems. Since the combined systems will be novel ones, prior results of research work conducted for the manufacturing systems or the management systems separately will not be valid, since the actual requirements will have to cover the needs of both manufacturing and managerial applications. This refers to, among other things, to performance evaluation. To evaluate performance, a method developed for packet switching networks with end-to-end acknowledgement was applied. The network is modelled as a set of closed routes consisting of a user and a series of service stations (communication links, switches, host processes). The paper describes the investigations carried out for the case study. Some consideration is given to the performance evaluation accuracy, basing on the validation work results obtained from analytical work, simulation and measurements on the Polish pilot wide area network.