Enabling technologies of agile manufacturing and its related activities in Korea

As product life cycle becomes shortened, high product quality becomes necessary for survival, markets become highly diversified and global, and continuous and unexpected change becomes the key factor for success. The need for a method of rapidly and cost-effectively developing products, production facilities and supporting software including design, process planning, shop floor control systems is becoming urgent. The essence of this concept of manufacturing would be characterized by introducing a new term agility or rapidity. When compared with computer integrated manufacturing, agile manufacturing can be defined as the capability of surviving and prospering in a competitive environment of continuous and unpredictable change by reacting quickly and effectively to changing markets, driven by customer-designed products and services. Critical to successfully accomplishing agile manufacturing are a few enabling technologies such as the standard for the exchange of products (STEP), concurrent engineering, virtual manufacturing, component-based heterarchical shop floor control system information and communication infrastructure, etc. This article details key concepts of those enabling technologies and presents various activities related to agile manufacturing under development in Korea, especially an agile manufacturing test-bed at Pohang University of Science and Technology and a prototype of the life cycle engineering study of a product model made in a consumer electronic industry.