Facing new challenges and more uncertainty, manufacturers see the need for flexible solutions and the need to strive to achieve flexibility. However, flexibility is still not well understood and no unambiguous understanding of flexibility exists. The paper first summarizes the state of the field of flexibility, exploring different definitions and understandings of the flexibility concept from t...

Nowadays the market for industrial companies is becoming more and more globalized and highly competitive, forcing them to shorten the duration of the manufacturing system development time in order to reduce the time to market. In order to achieve this target, the hierarchical systems used in previous manufacturing systems are not enough because they cannot deal effectively with unexpected situa...

It will be described a case study in the context of Continuous Education in New Manufacturing Systems. In the case study the term New Manufacturing Systems will be restricted to Flexible Manufacturing Systems context. The term Continuous Education will be analyzed as one six years experience in teaching and researching activities at post-graduation level at the cefet-pr.cpgei. The education-res...