The emphasis on increasing product variety and individualization has created a strong demand for a new strategy of Mass Customization Manufacturing (MCM). A competitive and flexible manufacturing system must be developed to respond to small batches of customer demand. In this paper, problems of highly flexible process-control and logistics-management methodologies are addressed to meet MCM need...

Application service provider (ASP) An organization that hosts software applications and provides information services for other organizations. Business intelligence software A category of software that enhances the ability of an organization’s decision makers to access and analyze enterprise information. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems An integrated information system that suppor...

Paradigms in modern production are shifting and pose new demands for optimization techniques. The emergence of new, versatile, reconfigurable and networked machines enables flexible manufacturing scenarios which require, in particular, planning and scheduling methods for cyber-physical production systems to be flexible, reasonably fast, and anytime. This paper presents an approach to flexible j...

Medium-term production planning and short-term scheduling match future production load and capacities over various horizons and on different levels of detail. Although these two levels of the decision hierarchy are strongly interdependent, traditional systems handle them separately. In the Proterv-II prototype system that was developed for manufacturing industries, the two levels are linked by ...

Due to short product life cycles, increasing variety of products and short cycles of leap innovations manufacturing companies have to increase the flexibility of factory structures. Flexibility of factory structures is based on defined factory planning processes in which product, process and resource data of various partial domains have to be considered. Thus factory planning processes can be c...

A major challenge in the area of global market economy is to develop new techniques for solving real world scheduling, planning, logistic and resource allocation problems. Indeed, any industrial organisation can only be economically viable by maximising customer services, maintaining efficient, low cost operations and minimising total investment. Significant domains exhibiting these characteris...

Conceptual process planning is a key activity for designers to evaluate manufacturability and manufacturing cost and time in the early product development stage. Since major manufacturing cost is determined in early design, it is critical to be able to assess manufacturability and cost as early as possible in the design process. The integration between process planning and design is critical to...