Mass customization (MC) relates to the ability to provide individually designed products and services to every customer through high process flexibility and integration. For responding to the mass customization trend it is necessary to develop an agility-based manufacturing system to catch on the traits involved in MC. An MC manufacturing agility evaluation approach based on concepts of TOPSIS ...

In the last decades significant changes in the manufacturing environment have been noticed: moving from a local economy towards a global economy, with markets asking for products with higher quality at lower costs, highly customised and with short life cycle. In these circumstances, the challenge is to develop manufacturing control systems with intelligence capabilities, fast adaptation to the ...

Producing customized products to respond to changing markets in a short time and at a low cost is one of the goals in agile manufacturing. To achieve this goal customized products can be produced using an assembly-driven product differentiation strategy. The successful implementation of this strategy lies in efficient scheduling of the system. However, little research has been done in addressin...

In the emerging agile manufacturing paradigm, there is a great need for a flexible and re-configurable IT platform to form virtual enterprises. In this paper, according to the functional requirements of virtual agile manufacturing, a pragmatic Web-based platform entitled ‘‘E-DREAM’’ has been developed to support the virtual enterprising. Firstly, this paper discusses the E-DREAM basic architect...

In the last decades significant changes in the manufacturing environment have been noticed: moving from a local economy towards a global economy, with markets asking for products with high quality at lower costs, highly customised and with short life cycle. In this environment, the manufacturing enterprises, to avoid the risk to lose competitiveness, search to answer more closely to the custome...

Increased reliance on agile manufacturing techniques has created a demand for systems to solve integrated process-planning and production-scheduling problems in lasge-scale dynamic environments. To be effective, these systems hould provide useroriented interactive functionality for managing the various user tasks and objectives and reacting to unexpected vents. This paper describes the mixed-in...

The concept of an "intelligent manufacturing system" (IMS) is a very broad one that has come to playa major role in manufacturing research in recent years. It is a concept that defies precise definition because one major research objective is to couple almost human levels of intelligence with advanced manufacturing technology in order to develop new generations of manufacturing systems that are...

Agile manufacturing (AM) is a 21 century concept in manufacturing firm intended to improve the competitiveness of firms. Manufacturing process based on AM is characterized by customer-supplier integrated process for product design, manufacturing, marketing and support services. This needs decision-making at functional knowledge levels, stable unit cost, flexible manufacturing, easy access to in...

The traditional way of business process development is via creating a detailed model of a business process in question, acquiring an IT-system to support it, and then implementing it in the organizational practice. Acquiring a system can be done via designing and manufacturing it by the business itself, or via commissioning it to somebody else. Alternatively, a generic system can be bought and ...