Abstract: Architectures provide the guidelines and framework for design and implementation of large complex automation systems ; information integration forms the basis of high performance of distributed automation systems. Referring to Chinese petrochemical companies, this paper studies the architecture and information integration problems for process manufacturing systems. We propose an architecture consisting of five views, namely, information, function, organization, product and resources, as well as three phases, i.e., requirement analysis, preliminary design and detailed design. Subsequently, we address the approaches for building various management databases, real-time databases and equipment model libraries. Then, based on CORBA standards we develop an information integration model for process manufacturing companies.