The paper discusses manufacturing enterprises’ compelling challenges that are directly stemming from generic conflicts between competition and cooperation, local autonomy and global behavior, design and emergence, planning and reactivity, uncertainty and a plethora of information. Responses in product and service design, organization of production networks, planning and management of operations, as well as production control are surveyed. As illustrated through industrial case studies, production engineering should integrate a rich body of interdisciplinary results together with contemporary information and communication technologies in order to facilitate cooperation and responsiveness that are vital in competitive, sustainable manufacturing.

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Cooperative and responsive manufacturing enterprises

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Building Enterprise Architecture Agility and Sustenance with SOA

Survey paper: Web-based rapid prototyping and manufacturing systems: A review

In ubiquitous manufacturing (UM) environment, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology enables real-time traceability, visibility and interoperability in improving the performance of shop-floor planning, execution and control. This paper presents an innovative gateway technology. A gateway is physically composed of smart objects that are logically related to each other according to a shop-floor workflow configuration. Although smart objects are equipped with heterogeneous RFID devices, they are converted into standard web services using the concept of agents. The resulted agent-based smart objects (ASOs) are then centrally managed through a specially purposed smart objects Universal Description, Discovery and Integration registry (SO-UDDI) where facilities such as register, publish, find, bind and invoke are provided for ASOs. Through these facilities, smart objects can be deployed at a gateway in a ''Plug and Play'' fashion. Real-time data are collected by smart objects from the shop floor and processed by the corresponding gateway for further application in enterprise information systems (EISs). The proposed framework is demonstrated through a smart forklift gateway around which smart objects are deployed.

Agent-based smart objects management system for real-time ubiquitous manufacturing

This paper describes a vision for utilising service-oriented architectures (SOA) to support the lifecycle needs of automation systems in the context of agile manufacturing, i.e., engineering easily configurable manufacturing systems composed of standard components that may be remotely supported by geographically distributed engineering partners to suit changing and unpredictable business needs. The paper briefly reviews the relevant state of the art in collaborative automation systems and considers the potential of SOA to support the practical implementation of such systems, with traditional product-oriented methods replaced by more service-oriented ways of working. As the SOA paradigm holds the promise of being applicable across the entire spectrum of manufacturing systems and devices, down to sensors and actuators, the paper further addresses issues involved in discovery and orchestration of device-level services and discusses the potential benefits of using semantic Web techniques for automating service selection, invocation and composition, so as to facilitate rapid reconfiguration. This discussion is supported by a practical example of device-level SOA.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/10487/33243/01569325.pdf

Service-oriented architectures for collaborative automation

In today's competitive manufacturing environment, the ability to effectively and efficiently manage the flow of information is a vital competency. Manufacturing enterprises must be able to integrate their internal business processes horizontally and vertically, and they are increasingly required to support federated business processes with other members of their respective virtual value chains. Web Services, an emerging form of service-oriented architecture for distributed computing, have the potential to serve as a key enabling technology to support these requirements. Leveraging the inherent interoperability of Internet and Worldwide Web technologies, they enable cooperative processing across heterogeneous computing environments. This paper presents a framework for evaluating the viability of Web Services technologies to be incorporated into enterprise information architectures to support the business needs and requirements of next generation manufacturing enterprises. It examines economic, technical, and organizational contexts that will influence the ability of manufacturing-related enterprises to deploy advanced information architectures based on Web Services to support the complex business processes needed to collaborate with suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders in virtual enterprise environments.

William A Estrem

Papers

An evaluation framework for deploying Web Services in the next generation manufacturing enterprise