Collaborative Evolution of Process Plans in Distributed Manufacturing

Abstract

Global production has become a new trend in the today?s competitive business environment in pursuit of lower cost, shorter time-to-market, and better quality. This forces manufacturing enterprises to separate design houses and manufacturing facilities. The design houses are located at the forefront of customers to respond to the rapidly changing customers? demands. The manufacturing facilities can be placed in the cost and quality-competitive areas. This physical and logical separation between designers and manufacturers (or between upstream manufacturers and downstream manufacturers), however, raises various integration issues. Particular issues addressed in this paper are the framework for representing the data necessary to communicate requirements and objectives of the designer and the methodology for utilizing such data to optimize the business objectives related to production cost and quality. The proposed representation and collaboration framework as well as methodology enables design houses and manufacturing facilities to realize the actual benefits of global production. They can scale to accommodate management of loosely integrated supply chain.