KEYNOTE PAPER - 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 M anufacturing Activities and Enterprises. It presents a synopsis of the investigations of pertinent architectures undertaken, and the finding s generated relating to the suitability of various architectures for t he integration task. It also presents the Task Force's recommendations for achieving a ''complete'' architecture in terms of the necessary c apabilities 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 archite ctures.