Present paper describes major RTD challenges and key technologies in order to respond to the demand for consumer oriented highly flexible and networked production systems. Shoe manufacturing is considered as a pilot sector, and a factory for the production of highly customized footwear is discussed as an example of agile and balanced production system, capable of integrating and cooperating wit...

The Information Economics and its platform can input the vigor into manufacturing industry, i.e. garment industry, and help to increase its ability for good return, can promote the level of technology and management of Garments from a labor-intensive industry, and can move it toward the accurate management. The platform is designed as Comprehensive Information Platform by our research team. Thi...

Manufacturing machines need to be re-tooled approximately 15 times per week and in the future even more often because of decreasing batch sizes increasing short-cyclic demands. Collaborative robots promise offer a versatile automation approach for priorly manual tasks small medium-sized enterprises. However, their configuration needs change at least as re-tooling rate different parts are produc...

This paper reports on new agile approaches and methods for design modelling of collaborative networked enterprises, ranging from small manufacturing supply-chains to major public service organizations. Use-cases in selected fields have been implemented by agile modelling and holistic design of collaborative networking capabilities, and active knowledge architecture driven solutions. The active ...

The success of Indian manufacturing in meeting global competition will depend on its speed to move itself from a protected domestic to a world-class global manufacturing status. This paper analyses a survey conducted for the purpose of determining world-class status of Indian manufacturing companies and identi"es important issues that need to be addressed in order to be a world-class manufactur...

This paper discusses the actual state of the manufacturing systems, focusing on the paradigms, requirements and problems for control and supervision. Based on the experience of the authors in those fields, a new approach to agile, distributed and cooperative manufacturing systems is presented and discussed. This new approach is based on a multi-agent platform that supports three main components...

Due to customers' requirements for customized products that meet their unique needs, manufacturing companies have to be more agile with how their shopfloors are configured. One paradigm for ensuring such agility is that of Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS). In a HMS, artificially intelligent entities (called holons) act both autonomously and cooperatively to manage the shopfloor in a distribu...