The quest for building systems that can function automatically has
attracted a lot of attention over the centuries and created continuous
research activities. As users of these systems we have never been
satisfied, and demand more from the artifacts that are designed and
manufactured. The current trend is to build autonomous systems that can
adapt to changes in their environment. While there is a lot to be done
before we reach this point, it is not possible to separate manufacturing
systems from this trend. The desire to achieve fully automated
manufacturing systems is here to stay. Manufacturing systems of the
twenty-first century will demand more flexibility in product design,
process planning, scheduling and process control. This may well be
achieved through integrated software and hardware archi- tectures that
generate current decisions based on information collected from
manufacturing systems environment, and execute these decisions by
converting them into signals transferred through communication network.
Manufacturing technology has not yet reached this state. However, the
urge for achieving this goal is transferred into the term 'Intelligent
Systems' that we started to use more in late 1980s. Knowledge-based
systems, our first efforts in this endeavor, were not sufficient to
generate the 'Intelligence' required - our quest still continues.
Artificial neural network technology is becoming an integral part of
intelligent manufacturing systems and will have a profound impact on the
design of autonomous engineering systems over the next few years.
