Manufacturing systems engineering and design: An intelligent, multi-model, integration architecture

Manufacturing system design is a complex process involving the integration of multiple systems designed by several designers each optimizing sub-systems. The life cycle of manufacturing systems design is also problematic because the size of the manufacturing system makes it incomprehensible by a single person, interdisciplinary in approach, asynchronous in operation, and constantly evolving. This scope also leads to long development times with requirements that are not well understood in the beginning and that change during the design/build cycle. Further, the requirements for the designers are often conflicting and non-functional. Also, individual designs must resolve concurrency issues with other individual designs. These issues are not appropriately addressed by the traditional serial design process. The problems with the current design paradigm for manufacturing systems are also exacerbated by temporal life cycle issues. Because the design life cycle of these systems often span months or years, the in...