This book elaborates on the information infrastructure needed by manufacturing enterprises in order to share information and to coordinate decision and control. This infrastructure should feature common methods and integrated applications for shop floor control, order processing, contract negotiation and cooperation in product and process development. Information Infrastructure Systems for Manufacturing addresses five main topics: The coordination and organization of information system requirements and their synthesis into comprehensive conceptual models; The development of reconfigurable information infrastructures, combining the conceptual models with computing, communication and storage technologies; The development of intelligent manufacturing systems; The design of models for extended enterprises and product life cycles; and The definition of related infrastructure services. The book contains the selected proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Design of Information Infrastructure Systems for Manufacturing (DIISM'98), sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held at Fort Worth, Texas, USA in May 1998. This valuable new book will be essential reading for researchers and all those working in production engineering, information technology for industrial enterprises, shop-floor computing and software engineering.
