OBJS Participation in NIIIP Consortium

NIIIP Goal is to enable Virtual Enterprises

The National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols (NIIIP) Consortium is developing technology to enable industrial virtual enterprises (VEs). An industrial VE is a temporary consortium of independent member companies which come together to quickly exploit fast-changing worldwide product manufacturing opportunities. Virtual Enterprises assemble themselves based on cost effectiveness and product uniqueness without regard for organization size, geographic location, computing environments, technologies deployed, or processes implemented. Virtual Enterprise companies share costs, skills, and core competencies which collectively enable them to access global markets with world class solutions that could not be provided individually.

The $60M project is one of the largest National Information Infrastructure programs (see About NIIIP and NIIIP members). The Director of the NIIIP Consortium is Richard Bolton (IBM). The DARPA Defense Science Office (DSO) program manager overseeing NIIIP is Kevin Lyons.

NIIIP Reference Architecture

In order to enable VEs, NIIIP is developing a reference architecture and a reference implementation that ties together several emerging infrastructure technologies: Internet, web, Object Management Group object technology, workflow, KBMS, rules, agents, and STEP product data. Rather than standardize protocols itself, NIIIP works through memberships in standards organizations, principally OMG (Internet SIG, Manufacturing TF), Workflow Management Consortium, and STEP. Much of the NIIIP work involves "harmonizing" existing protocols, and then doing pilot projects to prove out the approach.

Our contributions to NIIIP

The NIIIP work is directly aligned with our DARPA contracts and our Virtual Office direction. We have been involved in much of the NIIIP development, from conception to the present stage, focusing mainly on contributions to the NIIIP architecture and technology transfer. Some of our 1994-1996 contributions are:

• We helped identify NIIIP Consortium members in the pre-proposal stage.
• We helped draft the proposal as well as the Articles of Collaborative Agreement and Cooperative Agreement that formed NIIIP.
• We co-authored the NIIIP Reference Architecture (Chapter 1: Concepts and Guidelines (.ps)) which describes how the NIIIP component technologies fit together.
• We authored the NIIIP Architecture Technical Issues Log.
• We authored Virtual Enterprises Require OMA/WWW Integration, a position paper accepted for the Joint W3C-OMG Workshop on Distributed Objects and Mobile Code on NIIIP work in the area of OO and Web integration.
• We completed On Understanding the 12 System Protocols (NIIIP Internal document), an analysis of these proposed NIIIP protocols.
• We completed a Descriptive/Prescriptive Glossary of Software Architectural Terms (NIIIP Internal document), one of the first extensive glossaries of componentware terms (other than Gio Wiederhold's), covering many issues that NIIIP has been wrestling with for the last several months.
• We drafted an OMG Event-Condition-Action Rules Management RFP and worked with OMG groups to get it issued.
  

Last updated: 27 October 1996 - Back to OBJS homepage