Digital Manufacturing In The Global Era

The global era of manufacturing is going on. Digital Manufacturing is one of the core strategies of the European Manufuture vision and strategic agenda towards the knowledge based production. It is driven by the application and standardization of informationand communication-technologies and the increasing demand for the efficiency of operations in global networks. The environment of manufacturing is turbulent and requires permanent adaptation of the manufacturing systems. Manufacturing Engineering covers wide scales from networks to processes and from real time to long term operations. The tools of future engineering and management of manufacturing are digital and distributed. Strategic aspects and the potential and needs of research and development are main positions of the presentation.