Potential manufacturing productivity changes arising from the application of Internet-based technologies

This paper describes a series of industry-based projects involving simulation, scheduling and monitoring of the facilities in a distributed environment based on World Wide Web (WWW) technologies so that its operations located in geographically distant regions can be integrated. The recent WWW technologies would enable operations such as scheduling, simulation as well as the monitoring of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) through the Internet to be achieved. In the School of Manufacturing Engineering of Nanjing University of Science and Technology (NUST) in China, a manufacturing environment simulating the operations of a FMS has been created to provide a unique show-window for academics as well as industry through Internet. The users in NUST can use the web browser to access the server in Hong Kong and run the applets to schedule, simulate and monitor the FMS in Hong Kong. After building the server system with the necessary web server, video server and the applets linking to the machines of the FMS, the effect of changes in productivity will be studied.