Knowledge Systematization in the International IMS Research Program

The international Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) research program is an attempt to systematize and make operational world-wide knowledge of advanced manufacturing systems as a basis for new paradigms. This paper gives an overview of the IMS objectives, the six test cases to date, and the proposed future research activities. It describes the coordination of the IMS GNOSIS test case, concerned with knowledge systematization to support the full manufacturing life cycle. The systematic acceleration of scientific research was a major objective of the proposed Japanese Human Frontier research program. IMS is one of the first attempts to achieve such acceleration on a large-scale, and the paper concludes with a discussion of the need for system-theoretic models for the complex socio-technical systems involved in international collaborative research.