ARCHITECTURES FOR INTEGRATING MANUFACTURING ACTIVITIES AND ENTERPRISES

This paper is a summary of the major technical report (Williams et al. 1993) of the IFAC/IFIP Task Force on Architectures for Integrating Manufacturing Activities and Enterprises. It presents a synopsis of the investigations of pertinent architectures undertaken, and the findings generated relating to the suitability of various architectures for the integration task. It also presents the Task Force's recommendations for achieving a ''complete'' architecture in terms of the necessary capabilities by ''completing'' a currently available architecture. The Task Force also outlined how a ''best'' architecture could be achieved by selecting and combining the best features of the available architectures.