Weiming Shen - Böcker

The manufacturing sector has been facing major challenges as it undergoes revolutionary changes fuelled by new and sophisticated demands from customers, global competition, distribution of manufacturing and marketing activities, and technological advances. In order to address these challenges, manufacturing enterprises need to change the way they do business and adopt innovative technologies and solutions to increase their responsiveness and production efficiency. Information technology plays an essential role in this process. Current manufacturing systems are collections of complex systems or subsystems operating in distributed collaborative environments involving software, hardware, humans, and organizations. It is crucial to keep a balance between the technical aspects of automation and the human and social facets when applying information technology in industrial applications, particularly with the rapid advancements in information and communication technologies and the wide deployment of automated manufacturing systems. However, in order to create appropriate frameworks for exploring the best synergies between humans and automated systems, there are still numerous issues in terms of processes characterization, modeling, and development of adequate support tools. BASYS conferences have been developed and organized to promote the development of balanced automation systems in an attempt to address these issues. The first BASYS conference was successfully launched in Victoria, Brazil (1995), and then the following conferences were held in Lisbon, Portugal (1996), Prague, Czech Republic (1998), Berlin, Germany (2000), Cancun, Mexico (2002), and Vienna, Austria (2004).

Agent Technology, or Agent-Based Approaches, is a new paradigm for developing software applications. It has been hailed as 'the next significant breakthrough in software development', and 'the new revolution in software' after object technology or object-oriented programming.In this context, an agent is a computer system which is capable of acting autonomously in its environment in order to meet its design objectives. So in the area of concurrent design and manufacturing, a manufacturing resource, namely a machine or an operator, may cooperate and negotiate with other agents for task assignment; and an existing engineering software can be integrated with a distributed integrated engineering design and manufacturing system. Hence in agent-based systems, there is no centralized system control structure, and no pre-defined agenda for the system execution, as exist in traditional systems.This book systematically describes the principles, key issues, and applications of agent technology in relation to concurrent engineering design and manufacturing. It introduces the methodology, standards, frameworks, tools, and languages of agent-based approaches and presents a general procedure for building agent-based concurrent engineering design and manufacturing systems.Both professional and university researchers and postgraduates should find this an invaluable presentation of the corresponding theories and methods, with some practical examples for developing multi-agent systems in the domain.

The manufacturing sector has been facing major challenges as it undergoes revolutionary changes fuelled by new and sophisticated demands from customers, global competition, distribution of manufacturing and marketing activities, and technological advances. In order to address these challenges, manufacturing enterprises need to change the way they do business and adopt innovative technologies and solutions to increase their responsiveness and production efficiency. Information technology plays an essential role in this process. Current manufacturing systems are collections of complex systems or subsystems operating in distributed collaborative environments involving software, hardware, humans, and organizations. It is crucial to keep a balance between the technical aspects of automation and the human and social facets when applying information technology in industrial applications, particularly with the rapid advancements in information and communication technologies and the wide deployment of automated manufacturing systems. However, in order to create appropriate frameworks for exploring the best synergies between humans and automated systems, there are still numerous issues in terms of processes characterization, modeling, and development of adequate support tools. BASYS conferences have been developed and organized to promote the development of balanced automation systems in an attempt to address these issues. The first BASYS conference was successfully launched in Victoria, Brazil (1995), and then the following conferences were held in Lisbon, Portugal (1996), Prague, Czech Republic (1998), Berlin, Germany (2000), Cancun, Mexico (2002), and Vienna, Austria (2004).

Manufacturing has been one of the key areas that support and influence a nation’s economy since the 18th century. Being the primary driving force in economic growth, manufacturing constantly serves as the foundation of and contributes to other industries with products ranging from heavy-duty machinery to hi-tech home electronics. In the past centuries, manufacturing has contributed significantly to modern civilisation and created momentum that is used to drive today’s economy. Despite various revolutionary changes and innovations in the 20th century that contributed to manufacturing advancements, we are still facing new challenges when striving to achieve greater success in winning global competitions. Today, distributed manufacturing is unforeseeably coming into being due to recent business decentralisation and manufacturing outsourcing. Manufacturers are competing in a dynamic marketplace that demands short response time to changing markets and agility in production. In the 21st century, manufacturing is gradually shifting to a distributed environment with increasing dynamism. In order to win a competition, locally or globally, customer satisfaction is treated with priority. This leads to mass customisation and even more complex manufacturing processes, from shop floors to every level along manufacturing supply chains. At the same time, outsourcing has forged a multi-tier supplier structure with numerous small-- medium-sized enterprises involved, where highly-mixed products in small batch sizes are handled simultaneously in job-shop operations.

Manufacturing has been one of the key areas that support and influence a nation’s economy since the 18th century. Being the primary driving force in economic growth, manufacturing constantly serves as the foundation of and contributes to other industries with products ranging from heavy-duty machinery to hi-tech home electronics. In the past centuries, manufacturing has contributed significantly to modern civilisation and created momentum that is used to drive today’s economy. Despite various revolutionary changes and innovations in the 20th century that contributed to manufacturing advancements, we are still facing new challenges when striving to achieve greater success in winning global competitions. Today, distributed manufacturing is unforeseeably coming into being due to recent business decentralisation and manufacturing outsourcing. Manufacturers are competing in a dynamic marketplace that demands short response time to changing markets and agility in production. In the 21st century, manufacturing is gradually shifting to a distributed environment with increasing dynamism. In order to win a competition, locally or globally, customer satisfaction is treated with priority. This leads to mass customisation and even more complex manufacturing processes, from shop floors to every level along manufacturing supply chains. At the same time, outsourcing has forged a multi-tier supplier structure with numerous small-- medium-sized enterprises involved, where highly-mixed products in small batch sizes are handled simultaneously in job-shop operations.

The design of complex artifacts and systems requires the cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams using multiple commercial and non-commercial engineering tools such as CAD tools, modeling, simulation and optimization software, engineering databases, and knowledge-based systems. Individuals or individual groups of multidisciplinary design teams usually work in parallel and separately with various engineering tools, which are located on different sites, often for quite a long time. At any moment, individual members may be working on different versions of a design or viewing the design from various perspectives, at different levels of detail. In order to meet these requirements, it is necessary to have effective and efficient collaborative design environments. These environments should not only automate individual tasks, in the manner of traditional computer-aided engineering tools, but also enable individual members to share information, collaborate and coordinate their activities within the context of a design project. CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) in design is concerned with the development of such environments.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2005, held in Coventry, UK, in May 2005.The 65 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions during at least two rounds of reviewing and improvement. They contain expanded versions of the papers presented at the conference and are organized in topical sections on CSCW techniques and methods, Grids and Web services, agents and multi-agent systems, ontology and knowledge management, collaborative design and manufacturing, enterprise collaboration, workflows, and other related approaches and applications.

The design of complex artifacts and systems requires the cooperation of multidiscip- nary design teams using multiple commercial and proprietary engineering software tools (e.g., CAD, modeling, simulation, visualization, and optimization), engineering databases, and knowledge-based systems. Individuals or individual groups of mult- isciplinary design teams usually work in parallel and separately with various en- neering software tools which are located at different sites. In addition, individual members may be working on different versions of a design or viewing the design from different perspectives, at different levels of detail. In order to accomplish the work, it is necessary to have effective and efficient c- laborative design environments. Such environments should not only automate in- vidual tasks, in the manner of traditional computer-aided engineering tools, but also enable individual members to share information, collaborate, and coordinate their activities within the context of a design project. CSCW (computer-supported coope- tive work) in design is concerned with the development of such environments.