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Manufacturing industry worldwide has been facing unprecedented challenges brought by global competition and rapidly customer requirements which cause major changes in the production style and configuration of manufacturing enterprises. Networked Manufacturing enables rapid and efficient product development by equipment sharing which is a key component of networked manufacturing platform. The problems of poor transparency and low efficiency that the traditional way of equipment sharing faces, effectively overcome by leveraging the Internet, This paper proposes architecture for equipment sharing over the networked manufacturing platform involving the layer of resource sharing and the cooperative layer. An experimental case study has been carried out in a firm in the die-casting industry in order to demonstrate the features and the potential industrial application of the equipment sharing systems outlined in the current paper.

A side-effect of the continuing globalization is that manufacturing is more and more becoming a commodity. The manufacturing industry has to respond to rapidly changing markets more often and much faster than ever before while maintaining equivalent or better quality. The Automated Manufacturing System has been widely accepted as an enabling technology to respond quickly to the market changes and to improve the quality and operational efficiency of production. In this context, wireless sensors carry several advantages compared to traditional wired sensors in creating highly reliable shop floor control system, including self-organizing, self-healing, auto-routing, and self-controlling. This paper presents an agent-based simulation test bed to assist the system designer at each stage of development of wireless sensor based shop floor control systems. The proposed test bed exploits virtual factory approach in order to enhance the design and development process.

The design of the information system of manufacturing companies is a crucial endeavor in implementing a successful computer integrated manufacturing environment. The complexity of the manufacturing environment dictates the need for a systematic and structured approach to enable manufacturing system engineers to analyze and define their information requirement. Virtual reality based requirement analysis tool (VR-RA) has been developed for an existing novel methodology, in order to capture and represents the approach of experienced analyst studying the enterprise wide CIM information requirements. This paper introduces the methodology and describes the operational aspects of VR-RA, which is a user-friendly tool that can be used by people with little prior computer experience for the establishment of requirements.

This paper presents a methodology for analyzing requirements for the Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment in order to assist the system designer at each stage of development. This methodology aims to provide the high-level control HMS specifications from the problem requirements, specified by Client/User and provide clear and unambiguous analysis and design guidelines. Exploiting VR helps users to collect valid information quickly and in a correct form by putting the user and the information support elements in direct relation with the operation of the system in a more realistic environment. A VR-HMS-RA prototype tool is designed as a software system to realize the features outlined in each phase of the methodology.