Research has shown that organisations are moving towards agile manufacturing in response to a rapidly changing business environment. Agility is the competence of an organisation to respond to unpredictable business forces. This requires that an organisation develop dynamic management systems that are able to support continuous change. This paper examines systems thinking and proposes a holistic...

Agent-based systems technologies are of emerging interest in the specification and implementation of complex systems. This article introduces the CASA agent development system which seamlessly combines the BDI (Belief Desire Intention) approach with the FIPA agent communication language standard and an integrated specification of fuzzy controllers. The behavior of agents is defined by strategie...

Nowadays, in highly competitive global markets and constant pressure to reduce total costs, enterprises consider group technology and Supply Chain Management (SCM) accordingly and usually separately as the key elements for intra and inter facilities improvement. Simultaneous consideration of the elements of these two disciplines in an integrated design can result in higher efficiency and ...

Fabless semiconductor industries are facing the rise of design costs of integrated circuits. This rise is link to the technology change and the complexity increasing. It follows that integrated circuits have become targets of counterfeiting and theft. The SALWARE project aims to study (theoretically and experimentally) salutary hardware design in order to fight against theft, illegal cloning an...