Abstract
The investigation of existing architectures of CIM shop floor control systems has shown that they often fail to give the user a really usable tool. Usabilitity requirements such as ease of utilisation, installation and maintenance are not generally met. High engineering costs are an immediate result of these deficiencies leading to higher system costs and rendering these important tools inaccessible to the industry. INESC Industrial Automation Group has been undertaking R&D work in this field for the last six years, both through european and national projects. The results of one of these european projects ESPRIT Project 5478 Shop-Control, are now being installed in Portugal. The installation of this state-of-the-art tool calls far a considerable though expected effort, since Shop-Control is basically an integrated set of plant floor management tools that need special customisation to meet different shop floor requirements. Moreover, as a state-of-the-art shop floor control architecture, it aims at providing interoperability, integrating existing systems at the shop floor level as well as at management level. Since even state-of-the-art tools should be simple to install and use, a Decision Support System (DSS) supporting future Shop-Control installation teams on their task by allowing some installation automation as well as providing tools to manage the needed interoperability across different platforms, is being developed. Although biased by the Shop-Control and REAL-I-CIM (EP-8865) projects, a genuine effort is being made to make this Decision Support System a generic tool. This paper puts into perspective the relevance of CIM systems decision support, and describes the specification, design and testing of a novel DSS for shop floor CIM systems design, testing and installation.

Abstract
This paper describes results of work developed at INESC within the scope of the Esprit-5478 Shop-Control Project, as well as other related developments. The objective of the Shop-Control project1 has been to help SME's in reducing their operating expenses and enable them to deliver high quality products on schedule by providing them with an integrated shop floor control system. This system is built on an integrated set of shop floor application software packages interacting with the actual shop floor environment through factory data collection equipment and shop floor communication networks. The developed application packages include shop floor scheduling and dispatching, shop floor monitoring, supervision and alarm management, quality assurance and maintenance management. In this paper, the relevance of on-line shop floor data collection is put into focus and the underlying infrastructure is described. Information flow between interacting software applications is also presented, with a special emphasis for shop floor Supervision facilities. The integrated view on the shop floor which is achieved is of utmost importance in the support of shop floor management decision making in a wide range of end-user industries.