Application of concurrent engineering in design for one-of-a-kind production

To maintain the flexible and fast coordination of different design and manufacturing processes for make-to-order production the concurrent engineering (CE) approach seems to be a viable alternative, since classical computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) theories are not always applicable. The authors present a way of implementing the CE approach to establish a conceptual model of an intelligent system for designing and/or redesigning the manufacturing environment, and the joint production control processes with a coupled computer control architecture. The CE approach is demonstrated by means of some experiences on a prototype of a cooperative system for a manufacturing environment to design the processes and the plant-layout of production facilities for a given set of products. Knowledge processing technology was applied for representing and processing knowledge about make-to-order production systems. While utilizing these methodologies and procedures in a blackboard architecture, different advanced design tools were applied for system design and performance analysis