Frontier & Platform Research for System Development and Monozukuri

SYSTEM CONSIDERATIONS IN MONOZUKURI MANUFACTURING THE modern world faces many very difficult challenges, including global warming, resource and energy depletion, and rapid socioeconomic change. At the same time, while rapid progress is being made on establishing the foundations of a prosperous society, there are also calls from around the world for highly reliable social infrastructure that provides safety and security while being conscious of the global environment, including the changes needed to bring about a low-carbon society. Future manufacturing will need to undertake design, development, and production based on a global overview of the overall system for product creation and supply. For the platform technologies that support manufacturing, this will require moving beyond the focus on specific technologies adopted in the past toward a system-based approach, with technology able to provide low cost, high performance, and high reliability throughout all phases of the manufacturing process. The following two factors are considered to be important for developing a wide range of systems and other products globally: (1) Integration of a diverse range of multidisciplinary technologies to complement the existing technologies, which include simulation, testing and measurement, and production. These multidisciplinary technologies include advanced information technology (IT), computational engineering, data analysis techniques, systems, and service technologies. (2) The development of techniques for understanding, predicting, and controlling complex phenomena that occur in systems through the integration of models of real-world phenomena that span different scales.