This volume includes 41 revised papers selected from 125 papers presented at the th 6 IFIP Technical Committee 5/Working Group 5.7 International Conference on Advances in Production Management Systems - APMS'96 -held at Kyoto, Japan, 4-6 November 1996. The task of selecting papers was accomplished by the IPC members voting. The selected papers were reviewed by IPC members who attended the conference. Based on the comments of reviewers, each paper was revised and rewritten in the format of this book. Therefore, the quality of each paper was raised very much. The papers selected in this volume were classified into invited articles and six themes taking into account the perspectives and future challenges in production management systems. Invited articles provide the overview of the present and future trend in the manufacturing world. Six themes were Next Generation Manufacturing Systems and Production Management, Benchmarking, Integration in Manufacturing and Decentralized Production Management, Strategic Aspects, Production Planning, and Production Scheduling. Each theme covers important area of present and future production management reflecting the recent trend in manufacturing toward globalization, agility in variety production, human centered manufacturing, environment consciousness, and so on. We hope that this volume will emerge a lot of new ideas to reach the goal of IFIP WG5.7 "Computer Aided Production Management" and to bridge the gap between research and industrial practice in production management systems.

Inhalt
One Invited Articles.- 1 Productivity issues in the future enterprise: conclusions and recommendations from the TOPP program.- 2 Establishing an academic domain.- 3 Production management: which future?.- 4 Recent trends of new product development and production management in Japanese electronics industries.- Two Next Generation Manufacturing Systems and Production Management.- 5 Next generation manufacturing systems (NGMS) in the IMS program.- 6 Biological concept of self-organization for dynamic shop-floor configuration.- 7 A basic study on high volume flexible manufacturing system for agile manufacturing.- 8 The collaborative engineering process within the framework of the virtual enterprise.- 9 Collaborative autonomous control.- 10 An agent based control system for a model factory.- 11 Future enterprise types and strategies for agile manufacture.- Three Benchmarking.- 12 Performance analysis through benchmarking and recognition of patterns.- 13 Virtual benchmarking in logistics: a concept for the determination of benchmarks.- 14 A benchmarking model for the customer order flow in semi-processing industries.- Four Integration in Manufacturing and Decentralized Production Management.- 15 MRP-3 concurrent integration of planning and scheduling in OKP (one of a kind production).- 16 Analysis and design of production and control structures.- 17 Designing organizational structures of production systems using a process-oriented approach.- 18 Object-oriented representation of manufacturing systems: state of the art and perspectives.- 19 Autonomy and integration in decentralized production.- 20 Centralized and decentralized control: finding the right combination.- 21 Implementing new production management modes: orchestration of simultaneous improvement activities.- Five Strategic Aspects.- 22 Recent developments in the configuration of multiple-variant products: application orientation and vagueness in customer requirements.- 23 The ecology-driven service (r)evolution: the product longevity approach and its consequences for production and corporate management.- 24 The impact of manufacturing strategy on the design of production management systems: an exploratory study.- 25 Selection of assembly system configurations: a decision support system.- 26 Production control challenges in the food and iron industry.- 27 Expert system for new product strategy development.- 28 Performance evaluation of a JIT production system.- 29 Games for organizational learning in production management.- Six Production Planning.- 30 Production planning system coping with changing customer requirements.- 31 Production planning and control on the basis of control theory.- 32 Integrated production management for production planning, loading and scheduling.- 33 Integrated planning and scheduling for multi-product job-shop assembly based on genetic algorithms.- 34 Solution of the problem for a large scale integrated plan in the iron and steel production control.- Seven Production Scheduling.- 35 An autonomous jobshop scheduling system under dynamic production environment considering machine breakdowns.- 36 A study on holonic manufacturing systems and its applications to real time scheduling problems.- 37 Performance evaluation of distributed real-time scheduling systems using distributed production system simulator.- 38 Genetic algorithm approach to multi-objective scheduling problem in plastic forming plant.- 39 A synthesized chart for scheduling of production systems with automated guided vehicle.- 40 Scheduling for an automated three-machine flowshop manufacturing system.- 41 DÉJÀ VU: a reusable framework for the construction of intelligent interactive schedulers.- Index of contributors.- Keyword index.