Center for Integrated Manufacturing Decision Systems: an overview

The Center for Integrated Manufacturing Decision Systems at Carnegie Mellon University has been created to perform research in intelligent decision systems for engineering and manufacturing problem solving. The Center´s research has two goals: to increase the quality of decisions at each stage of the production manufacturing life cycle, including design, planning, production, distribution, and field service, and to achieve an order-of-magnitude increase in decision making quality by focusing on planning and control systems, which integrate decision making throughout the enterprise. The center has created seven laboratories, each focusing on a portion of engineering/manufacturing decision making: design (the rapid and integrated design of electromechanical parts); production planning (integrating process and facility planning); rapid manufacturing (automating unit process planning programming and control); automated factory scheduling (predictive and reactive detailed scheduling); manufacturing logistics (parts on demand); intelligent measurement and control (multiple process focus); and manufacturing system architecture (representation and communication of factory knowledge and control). Issues and goals for each laboratory are described