Information Infrastructure Systems For Manufacturing

On the verge of the global information society, enterprises are competing for markets that are becoming global and driven by customer demand, and where growing specialisation is pushing them to focus on core competencies and look for partnerships to provide products and services. Simultaneously the public demands environmentally sustainable industries and urges manufacturers to mind the whole life span of their products and production resources. Information infrastructure systems are anticipated to offer services enabling and catalyzing the strategies of manufacturing companies responding to these challenges: they support the formation of extended enterprises, the mastering of full product and process life cycles, and the digitalization of the development process. Information infrastructure systems would accommodate access to and transformation of information as required by the various authorized stakeholders involved in the life phases of products or production resources. Services should be available to select and present all relevant information for situations involving any kind of players, during any life phase of a product or artifact, at any moment and at any place.

The possible benefits, the external characteristics, and the broad-range requirements of information infrastructure systems for intelligent manufacturing systems are widely known. However, it is recognized that various problems are impeding achievement in this area, including the lack of understanding and agreement about techniques and methods for coordinating and systematizing the broad-range information processing requirements , and for synthesizing these requirements into deeply structured, easily adaptable and comprehensive conceptual models . This hampers the development of information infrastructures amalgamating the conceptual models and computing/communication/storage technologies, and the development of intelligent manufacturing systems amalgamating the information infrastructures with advanced machine tools and skillful people.This publication elaborates on these issues and affords a greater understanding of, and agreement about, methods, techniques and tools for solving related problems. To ensure an in-depth coverage of the wide problem domain, contributions, sourced from reknowned experts, are focused on some of the most relevant research and development issues. The book will provide a useful foundation of information for further research and development on information infrastructure systems for manufacturing.

In this global society, manufacturers compete in many ways, and information infrastructures play a critical role in ensuring the right information is available at the right time and the right place to support informed decision making. The traditional approach that assumes all information can be located on a single mainframe and accessed by everybody in the enterprise has fallen by the wayside, and new infrastructures supporting extended or virtual enterprises and globally distributed supply chains are becoming increasingly vital to successful, competitive organizations. Functions, data, and information must be made be available to all without regard to location, accessibility, or the ability to view in a native format. This book is a result of a conference, which brought together a number of leading experts from around the world that work on topics related to the design, implementation, and use of information infrastructures for manufacturing. These experts presented their views on the state of the art, and on a wide variety of topics related to the title. The topics range from the establishment of a generic enterprise framework, which can be used for the design of a supporting information infrastructure to details of how geometric surfaces should be merged together. Although not an exhaustive publication, we believe that the publications in this book represent the state of the art in this research is essential reading for anyone who is attempting the design or development of an information infrastructure for all aspects of Manufacturing.

The availability of effective global communication facilities in the last decade has changed the business goals of many manufacturing enterprises. They need to remain competitive by developing products and processes which are specific to individual requirements, completely packaged and manufactured globally. Networks of enterprises are formed to operate across time and space with world-wide distributed functions such as manufacturing, sales, customer support, engineering, quality assurance, supply chain management and so on. Research and technology development need to address architectures, methodologies, models and tools supporting intra- and inter-enterprise operation and management. Throughout the life cycle of products and enterprises there is the requirement to transform information sourced from globally distributed offices and partners into knowledge for decision and action. Building on the success of previous DrrSM conferences (Tokyo 1993, Eindhoven 1996, Fort Worth 1998), the fourth International Conference on Design of Information Infrastructure Systems for Manufacturing (DrrSM 2000) aims to: • Establish and manage the dynamics of virtual enterprises, define the information system requirements and develop solutions; • Develop and deploy information management in multi-cultural systems with universal applicability of the proposed architecture and solutions; • Develop enterprise integration architectures, methodologies and information infrastructure support for reconfigurable enterprises; • Explore information transformation into knowledge for decision and action by machine and skilful people; These objectives reflect changes of the business processes due to advancements of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the last couple of years.

Since the first DIISM conference, which took place 9 years ago, the world has seen drastic changes, including the transformation of manufacturing and engineering software, and the information and communication technologies deployed. The conditions for manufacturing and engineering have changed on a large scale, in terms of technology-enabled collaboration among the fields of design, engineering, production, usage, maintenance and recyclingldisposal. These changes can be observed in rapidly-growing fields such as supply chain management. As for production technologies at factory floors, new visions on human-machine co-existing systems involve both knowledge management and multi-media technologies. Therefore, because of these changes, the importance of information infrastructure for manufacturing has increased, stunningly. Information infrastructure plays a key role in integrating diverse fields of manufacturing, engineering and management. This, in addition to its basic role, as the information and communication platform for the production systems. Eventually, it should also serve the synthetic function of knowledge management, during the life cycles of both the production systems and their products, and for all stakeholders.

Knowledge and Technology Integration in Production and Services presents novel application scenarios for balanced distributed and integrated systems based on knowledge and up-to-date technology and provides a great opportunity for discussion of concepts, models, methodologies, technological developments, case studies, new research ideas, and other results among specialists. It comprises the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information Technology for BALANCED AUTOMATION SYSTEMS in Manufacturing and Services (BASYS'02), which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in September 2002 in Cancun, Mexico.

This book describes a vision of manufacturing in the twenty-first century that maximizes efficiencies and improvements by exploiting the full power of information and provides a research agenda for information technology and manufacturing that is necessary for success in achieving such a vision. Research on information technology to support product and process design, shop-floor operations, and flexible manufacturing is described. Roles for virtual manufacturing and the information infrastructure are also addressed. A final chapter is devoted to nontechnical research issues.