Towards Balanced Automation The concept. Manufacturing industries worldwide are facing tough challenges as a consequence of the globalization of economy and the openness of the markets. Progress of the economic blocks such as the European Union, NAFTA, and MERCOSUR, and the global agreements such as GATT, in addition to their obvious economic and social consequences, provoke strong paradigm shifts in the way that the manufacturing systems are conceived and operate. To increase profitability and reduce the manufacturing costs, there is a recent tendency towards establishing partnership links among the involved industries, usually between big industries and the networks of components' suppliers. To benefit from the advances in technology, similar agreements are being established between industries and universities and research institutes. Such an open tete-cooperation network may be identified as an extended enterprise or a virtual enterprise. In fact, the manufacturing process is no more carried out by a single enterprise, rather each enterprise is just a node that adds some value (a step in the manufacturing chain) to the cooperation network of enterprises. The new trends create new scenarios and technological challenges, especially to the Small and Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) that clearly comprise the overwhelming majority of manufacturing enterprises worldwide. Under the classical scenarios, these SMEs would have had big difficulties to access or benefit from the state of the art technology, due to their limited human, financial, and material resources.

Inhalt
One Invited Talks.- 1 The extended enterprise manufacturing and the value chain.- 2 Continuous education in new manufacturing systems.- Two Enterprise Modeling and Organization I.- 3 Information and command infrastructures for small and medium size enterprises.- 4 Narrowing the gap of SME for IT innovation with enterprise architectures.- 5 One-product-integrated-manufacturing.- Three Intelligent Supervision Systems.- 6 Transition enabling Petri nets to supervisory control theory.- 7 Planning, training and learning in supervision of flexible assembly systems.- 8 Automated planning for restarting batch procedure in the wake of an incident (single product).- Four Modeling and Design of FMS I.- 9 An object-oriented approach to the design of flexible manufacturing systems.- 10 Integration of object oriented programming and Petri nets for modelling and supervision of FMS/FAS.- 11 Design of FMS: logical architecture.- Five Anthropocentric Systems.- 12 Issues on the anthropocentric production systems.- 13 A complimentary approach to flexible automation.- Six Computer Aided Process Planning.- 14 AI for manufacturing: some practical experience.- 15 A manufacturing support system for industrial part process planning.- 16 Fuzzy logic for similarity analysis.- Seven Scheduling Systems.- 17 HOLOS: a methodology for deriving scheduling systems.- 18 Evaluation of on-line schedules by distributed simulation.- 19 Integration of process planning and scheduling using resource elements.- Eight Decision Support Systems in Manufacturing.- 20 A decision making tool in FMS design.- 21 Multipurpose layout planner.- 22 Towards more humanized real time decision support systems.- Nine Shop Floor Control.- 23 Interoperability testing in an implementation of ISO/OSI protocols.- 24 Supporting theinformation management of control activities in a CIM shop floor environment.- 25 Object-oriented development methodology for PLC software.- Ten Multiagent Systems Architecture.- 26 Support for concurrent engineering in CIM-FACE.- 27 A federated cooperation architecture for expert systems involved in layout optimization.- 28 A holistic approach to intelligent automated control.- Eleven Enterprise Modeling and Organization II.- 29 Reference models for an object oriented design of production activity control systems.- 30 Organizational behaviour analysis and information technology fitness in manufacturing.- 31 An integrated framework for the development of Computer Aided Engineering Systems.- Twelve Modeling and Design of FMS II.- 32 Formal and informal in balanced system specifications.- 33 PFS/MFG: a high level net for the modeling of discrete manufacturing systems.- 34 Discrete event and motion-oriented simulation for FMS.- Thirteen Balanced Flexibility.- 35 Group technology considerations for manufacturing systems with balanced flexibility.- 36 Product differentiation and process flexibility as a base for competitive strategy.- 37 Balanced automatization levels in manufacturing systems.- Fourteen CAE/CAD/CAM Integration.- 38 Architecture solutions for integrating CAD, CAM, and machining in small companies.- 39 A feature-based concurrent engineering environment.- 40 A framework for feature based CAD/CAM integration.- Fifteen Monitoring and Sensors.- 41 CNC machines monitoring using sensorial stochastic models.- 42 No knowledge to waste learning more about processes.- 43 3-D vascular reconstruction on a standard X-ray angiography machine.- Index of contributors.- Keyword index.