Apps for advanced Manufacturing Engineering

The transition from mass production to personalised, customer-oriented, and eco-efficient manufacturing is considered to be a promising approach to improve and secure the competitiveness of the EU manufacturing industries. Enablers in this transition are agile IT systems supporting flexibility at different levels: production network, factory, process. Over the past few years, attention has been paid to the use of ICT via mobile manufacturing applications. Although such manufacturing applications are still in their infancy, with many core life cycle activities not yet fully addressed, they may present a promising development that could potentially lead to breakthrough innovations and new manufacturing capability, as shown in this paper.