Technical Intelligence for Manufacturing

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. This paper suggests that the future of manufacturing will have to move forward across a broad front that pushes the technologies and concepts already being developed and applied and those that need to be developed, refined and adopted. Some of these are already being considered in manufacturing, while others are innovative product technologies that have been or are being developed in other sectors, mainly the automobile, mechatronics, information processing and communications sectors. Innovative manufacturing and pushing processing technologies to the extremes of physical limits. Another aspect is the miniaturization of production. All these will lead to autonomous machines that can learn and compensate for changes in conditions automatically by themselves. Developments may well lead to machines being operated or maintained by manufacturers of machines from remote sites. These developments are at different stages of realization, with some of them being too far in the future. However, they are too important to be ignored.