COLLABORATIVE MANUFACTURING:E-WORK IN THE MANUFACTURING ENVIRONMENT

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MOVING FROM FACILITATING TO ENABLING COLLABORATION: E-WORK IN THE MANUFACTURING ENVIRONMENT

We define e-work as collaborative, computer-supported activities and communication-supported op- erations in highly distributed organizations of humans and / or robots or autonomous systems, and we investigate fundamental design principles for their effectiveness (Nof 2000a,b). The premise is that without effective e-work, the potential of emerging and promising electronic work activities, such as virtual manufacturing and e-commerce, cannot be fully realized. Two major ingredients for future effectiveness are autonomous agents and active protocols. Their role is to enable efficient information exchanges at the application level and administer tasks to ensure smooth, efficient interaction, col- laboration, and communication to augment the natural human abilities.

In an analogy to massively parallel computing and network computing, the teamwork integration evaluator (TIE) has been developed (Nof and Huang 1998). TIE is a parallel simulator of distributed, networked teams of operators (human, robots, agents). Three versions of TIE have been implemented with the message-passing interface (on Intel’s Paragon, on a network of workstations, and currently on Silicon Graphics’ Origin 2000):

1. TIE / design (Figure 3) to model integration of distributed designers or engineering systems (Khanna et al. 1998)

2. TIE / agent (Figure 4) to analyze the viability of distributed, agent-based manufacturing enter- prises (Huang and Nof, 1999)

3. TIE / protocol (Figure 5) to model and evaluate the performance of different task administration active protocols, such as in integrated assembly-and-test networks (Williams and Nof 1995)

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