Much progress has been made in recent years in the development of Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) tools for engineering design, analysis, and manufacturing. Unfortunately, most of these CAD/CAM applications were constructed independently and without standardization. In essence, they automate a single aspect of design, analysis, or manufacturing and cannot be combined to form a cohesive environment, since integration among applications was not addressed during the design phase of CAD/CAM application software creation.

In view of this problem, a novel approach is suggested for software integration of applications in a network environment. The distributed integration solution described in this dissertation employs a new "integration client/server" relationship, where the integration server is the core of the system, providing functions to translate or transform data between applications. The integration client consists of an interface with the server, a CAD/CAM application, and a user interface with the integrated system called the GRIM (GRaphical Interface Manager). There is only one integration server in the system, but there may be an unlimited number of clients.

The solution created for distributed integration is implemented in a Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) workbench, geared specifically toward the generation of integration systems. This workbench is known as the CAD/CAM CASE Workbench, and includes an integration solution as well as standard CASE tools. The integration solution contains several tools which will aid a system designer in generating integration systems for CAD/CAM applications. Included is the distributed integration solution described in this dissertation. The distributed integration solution is designed to facilitate the semi-automatic generation of an integration system. It consists of an integration server at the center of the integration system which manages the exchange of data among the integration clients. The integration clients are the CAD/CAM applications in the context of the integration system. To use the distributed integration solution, the integration system designer will customize portions of the structure charts, data dictionary, and module specifications contained in the workbench according to the needs of the applications programs and generate C-source code defining the integration system.

Using the distributed integration solution, the user will be able to effect data requests for applications, using the GRIM to interact with the system. All data exchanges are request driven. In addition to the distributed integration solution, this research includes a prototype integrated system which allows data to be requested from one application, and translated to a second for display and manipulation. The prototype was tested in a distributed environment and the results are described.