Mass customization requires frequent product changeovers thus leading to the need of manufacturing systems endowed with flexibility and reconfiguration capabilities, in order be robust changes production scenario. Therefore, companies face a relevant risk when taking strategic decisions about which system resources should acquired. This can mitigated by exploiting performance evaluation models,...

During the last few years Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) became an important aspect in the manufacturing industry. The di erent components of CIM as there are the CAx techniques on the engineering side and manufacturing planning and control systems (MPC-systems) on the operational side now show their in uence on organizational structures and the working environment. Limits and problems...

A manufacturing system is a product, and has to be designed as any other product. Therefore, a need for adequate methodological support and tools for modeling, structuring, and control of the next generation manufacturing systems is recognized. In this study, the adaptive distributed modeling framework for collaborative design and operations of network manufacturing systems is presented. In man...

Flexibility will be one of the key features in future manufacturing systems because the environments that surround manufacturing systems are rapidly changing from day to day. To satisfy this requirement, the hierarchical systems used in previous manufacturing systems are not enough because they cannot deal effectively with unexpected situations. Moreover, a lot of software modules have to be mo...