Supporting Distributed Collaborative Work in Manufacturing Industry

Manufacturing companies face a great need to improve competitiveness and strengthen market position. This pressure demands a strong collaboration from all actors involved in the product or production value chain. However, manufacturing industry is still missing the necessary support, in methodologies and tools, to achieve efficient collaboration strategies. This paper introduces an innovative approach to support collaboration in assembly and manufacturing systems, being developed in the scope of the European project InAmI. The main idea of the approach is to combine agent, ambient intelligence and semantic-based knowledge management technologies to provide the most appropriate use of all knowledge within extended enterprises, to support collaboration. The InAmI innovative approach comprehends a methodology and a platform for the efficient creation and maintenance of collaborative services