COMPUTER INTEGRATED MANUFACTURING:FUTURE TRENDS OF CIM

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FUTURE TRENDS OF CIM

As a manufacturing paradigm, CIM concepts and practice have developed for more than 20 years. CIM is still in active development and has received much attention from researchers and companies. Some of the development trends for CIM are as follows.

Agile Manufacturing

In today’s continuously, rapidly, and unforeseeably changing market environment, an effective way to keep the company competitive is to use the agile manufacturing strategy. Agile manufacturing has been called the 21st-century manufacturing enterprise strategy (Goldman and Preiss 1991; Goldman et al. 1995). By agile, we mean that the company can quickly respond to market change by quickly reengineering its business processes, reconfiguring its manufacturing systems, and innovating its products.

A number of papers discuss the characteristics of an agile manufacturing company, such as:

• Greater product customization

• Rapid introduction of new or modified products

• Increased emphasis on knowledgeable, highly trained, empowered workers

• Interactive customer relationships

• Dynamic reconfiguration of production processes

• Greater use of flexible production technologies

• Rapid prototyping

• An agile and open system information environment

• Innovative and flexible management structures

• Rapid collaboration with other companies to form a virtual company.

Green Manufacturing

The increasingly rapid deterioration of environment has caused many problems for society. During the production of products, manufacturing companies also produce pollution to the environment. Pollution produced during the manufacturing processes includes noise, waste gas, wastewater, and waste materials. Another kind of pollution is caused by waste parts at the end of the product’s life, such as batteries, printed circuit boards, and plastic covers. Green manufacturing aims at developing a manufacturing paradigm and methods for reducing pollution by a manufacturing company of the environment. The green manufacturing paradigm covers the whole life cycle of a product, from requirements specification, design, manufacturing, and maintenance to final discarding. Research topics in green manufacturing include:

• Green design (also called design for environment) considers the product’s impact on the envi- ronment during the design process, designing a product that causes minimal pollution. Multi-life-cycle design, which considers multiple use of most parts and recycling one-time-use parts, has received much attention.

• Green materials involves development of materials that can be easily recycled.

• Green production involves developing methods to reduce pollution during the production pro- cess.

• Green disposal: developing new methods to recycle the discarded products.

Virtual Manufacturing and Other Trends

By using virtual reality and high-performance simulation, virtual manufacturing focuses on building a digital model of the product and studies the dynamic and kinetic performance of the product to reduce product development cost and time.

Many development trends are affecting CIM and its related technologies. Technologies that may have a great influence on CIM include network (Web) technology, distributed object technology, intelligent agent technology, knowledge integration technology, and CSCW technology. CIM systems, using these advanced paradigms and technologies, will have a brilliant future. In the future, a man- ufacturing company supported by an advanced CIM system may be operated in an Internet environ- ment (Web user interface), running on a virtual dynamic organization structure, using CSCW tools,

to design and produce products in a cooperated and integrated way. The company will fully satisfy user requirements and produce products quickly and cheaply. Materials and products will be delivered on time.

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