PREFACE
The IFAC Workshop on Manufacturing, Modelling, Management and Control (MIM 2001) was held in Prague, Czech Republic, 2-4 August 2001 at the Czech Technical University. The main sponsor of the event was IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control), co-sponsored by IFIP (International Federation of Information Processing) and supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
The Technical Committee (TC) of lFAC on Manufacturing, Modelling, Management and Control (MIM) was constituted during the IFAC General Assembly in 1993, as the evolution of the Working Group on "Modelling for Manufacturing Management and Controls (M3C), originally organised within the TC on Manufacturing Technology. Main motivation for the evolution from Working Group to TC was the growing interest in formal and well assessed models for an efficient and effective programming and control of production loads and flows in discrete manufacturing plants, with special attention to large-scale production systems.
Based on the great interest and success of the TC-MIM conferences of the past it was decided during MIM 2000 in Patras, Greece, that in years when there is no TC-MIM conference we would organise MIM workshops. Such a workshop should be more open than a conference, consisting of less formal presentations, giving room to more discussions and personal contacts. One of the reasons for choosing Prague as the host of the first TC-MIM workshop is that the 16th International Conference on Production Research (ICPR-16), organised by the International Foundation for Production Research (IFPR), and co-sponsored by the World Federation of Engineering Organisations and the Czech Association of Scientific and Technical Societies took place in Prague during 29 July - 3 August, 2001. ICPR is a prestigious and usually large meeting and the number of papers submitted was around 800, with a total attendance of almost 800 from over 50 countries. Our TC-MIM Workshop is more modest, with 22 papers presented, selected from 40 submitted papers.
The TC-MIM Workshop was organised intentionally to be partly overlapping with ICPR so that the ICPR participants could attend the workshop. TC-MIM participants could also meet ICPR members, and take part in some ICPR events. As the topics of the two events are quite close to each other it is of special value that the MIM and ICPR communities are getting closer to each other.
The workshop goals concern the development, the comparison and the application of formal models, both descriptive and prescriptive, of Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) systems. Proposed models should be able to integrate optimisation methods, simulation procedures and knowledge-based tools. The target of the workshop activities was to encourage the active discussion and specification of new models to be used in planning and simulating manufacturing, management and control strategies, including discrete-event and continuous representations. Based on the evaluated and accepted papers the workshop consisted of the following sessions: Production Planning; Virtual Manufacturing; Scheduling; Design, Planning, Management; Monitoring, Diagnostics; Manufacturing, Machining; Software, Decision Support Systems; Engineering, Control, Modelling. Finally, a good equilibrium of traditional and modern disciplines of manufacturing automation was present.
The organisers of the TC-MIM Workshop are especially thankful to the Czech Technical University, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture for their assistance to organise the meeting in Prague in conjunction to the ICPR-16 Conference.
We hope that the results of the workshop, including these proceedings
and the agenda for future collaboration in research and education within
the scope of TC-MIM will be useful to the general, professional community
and to students and scholars of manufacturing modelling for management
and control.
Prof. George L. Kovács