Th. Borangiu - Böcker

Robotics, Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence were, for a long time, headlines in production automation and a lot of scientific events dealt with these three main topics.

During the last six years however, methods of Artificial Intelligence have been implemented more and more in production automation, especially in production planning, control and supervision. This has lead to new headlines about Intelligent Computer Integrated Manufacturing (ICIM) or Intellligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) which have become important for the computer-controlled factory of the future.

This third IFAC workshop on Intelligent Manufacturing Systems continued discussions and the exchange of research results that began with the previous two workshops: in Dearborn, USA in 1992 and in Vienna, Austria in 1994. It included presentations about manufacturing systems operations, manufacturing processes, manufacturing planning, concurrent engineering, object-oriented design, simulation and fault detection.