PILOT CIM IMPLEMENTATION FOR LEAN ENGINEERING EXPERIMENTATION

The attainment of a lean engineering organization is the critical requ irement for ensuring a return on investment in intelligent manufacturi ng. Achieving this is based on measuring the effects of flexibility, a nd on the capability of exploiting the resources' adaptability by comb ined control and management of the product and production processes. T his objective needs extended experimentation of the actual behaviour o f the manufacturing facilities. This paper introduces the opportunitie s offered by the availability of a prototypical implementation that jo ins a simple pilot plant to a computer simulator.