Publications Details
Final report: An enabling architecture for information driven manufacturing
This document is the final report for the LDRD: An Enabling Architecture for Information Driven Manufacturing. The project was motivated by the need to bring quality products to market quickly and to remain efficient and profitable with small lot sizes, intermittent production and short product life cycles. The emphasis is on integration of the product realization process and the information required to drive it. Enterprise level information was not addressed except in so far as the enterprise must provide appropriate information to the production equipment to specify what to produce, and the equipment must return enough information to record what was produced. A production script approach was developed in which the production script specifies all of the information required to produce a quality product. A task sequencer that decomposes the script into process steps which are dispatched to capable Standard Manufacturing Modules. The plug and play interface to these modules allows rapid introduction of new modules into the production system and speeds up the product realization cycle. The results of applying this approach to the Agile Manufacturing Prototyping System are described.