Challenges and frontiers of manufacturing systems

Manufacturing paradigm plays a very important role in the national competitiveness of manufacturing industries. In recent 40 years, the developed countries have begun their research programs in advanced production system and new production paradigms such as intelligent manufacturing, mass customization and sustainable manufacturing, have been proposed in a bid to exceed the traditional "mass production" paradigm. The research in production system area considers not only the technical factor, but also economic and social factors. The research in production system area covers from modeling, analyzing, and designing production system to operating and controlling it. The fundamental objectives are optimizations of productivity, quality, cost, service, and environment as well. Today on the one hand, we still need tremendous tasks on optimizing tool which is usually obtained from operations research and system theory because of the complexity of production system. On the other hand the modern information and communication technology (ICT) has supplied new opportunities, the information driven manufacturing has become the hottest research topics and made a great progress. In the future the production system must be planned and operated more precisely than today, based on the new ICT, to win the competitiveness. Looking into the future, manufacturing systems will develop toward the directions of precision, green and service. Under this background, the research on production systems will face more opportunities and challenges.