Intelligent Manufacturing Systems for the Next Century

Up to now companies focussed their development and usage of flexible manufacturing systems mainly on the automation of the systems functions and the peripheral subsystems like transport and logistics. The main objective of this developments was to increase the technical and organizational utilization rates in the single and small batch production. Additional future potentials of manufacturing systems are to activate by operations in the extreme fields of technologies like high speed, high volume and high precision. In this fields of operations the process management will become the critical success factor just in view of high performance and zero defects. The change drivers of future manufacturing systems are again the electronic based technologies including sensors and actors as well as methods of the information processing like artificial neural networks and their integration to autonomous control and active exploration. This intelligent manufacturing systems can be managed over long distances in communication networks. They will allow teleservice and teleoperations.