Traditional methods of achieving manufacturing system safety exploit the highly repetitive nature of traditional manufacturing operations. With agile manufacturing systems, the interactions between machinery and personnel (operator, set-up, and maintenance) become less predictable. The smaller batches and more varied product drive hardware and software designs that are difficult to model and im...

A future adaptive and reconfigurable manufacturing system has to address, beside the requirements for agile and fast reaction to sudden and unpredictable changes in production demands, also the problem of user acceptance and understanding of such highly intelligent reconfigurable systems. Thus, the usability is a major criterion for the design of future manufacturing systems. The design and dev...

Current manufacturing planning software systems (such as computer aided process planning (CAPP) systems) are general and in a closed form, i.e., i t i s very difficult to modify these systems to respond to a user's dynamically changing needs. These systems are not well suited to agile manufacturing. This research work aims at developing an architecture for rapid development of CAF'P systems. Th...

The Virtual Organizations paradigm is gaining a growing importance in manufacturing as an instrument to help companies face the challenges of fast evolving market conditions. In this context an overview of current trends in areas such as virtual enterprises, industry clusters, virtual communities, remote supervision and virtual laboratories, and required infrastructures is presented. Fast shop-...

This paper presents a new method to identify classes during object-oriented software development. The approach uses process mapping and clustering technique for achieving unambiguous transition from requirements to the definition of object-oriented classes. We draw analogy between forming cells in cellular manufacturing and class formation in object-oriented software development and accordingly...

For manufacturing industries, the integration of business processes from customer-order management to delivery (Supply Chain Management) has widely been received much attention from the viewpoints of agile and lean manufacturing. Supply chain planning concerns broad activities ranging network-wide inventory management, forecasting, transportation, distribution planning, production planning and ...

In this paper we describe a layered software architecture in the management of a manufacturing company that intensively uses computer technology. Application tools, new and legacy, after the updating, operate in a context of an open web oriented architecture. The software architecture enables the integration and interoperability among all tools that support business processes. Manufacturing Exe...