Adaptive integrated manufacturing enterprises: information technology for the next decade

A new vision effecting adaptiveness in integrated manufacturing enterprises for the next decade is formulated. This vision has been developed on the basis of intensive research over the past nine years in Rensselaer's industry-sponsored Computer Integrated Manufacturing Program. Built from existing results in both the scientific community and industry, the proposed research agenda calls for new fundamental information technology to enable Adaptive Integrated Manufacturing Enterprises (AIME). It focuses on four major problems: (1) management of multiple systems that operate concurrently over a widely distributed network without a central controller; (2) achievement of an open systems architecture that can accommodate legacy systems as well as add new systems; (3) exploitation of object-oriented technology in production systems with the crucial ability to manage heterogeneous views and propagate changes between views; and (4) modeling of enterprise information requirements for inspection and the utilization of inspection information to create a feedback loop from production to design. These problems and approaches to their solution developed are analyzed.<>