In this global society, manufacturers compete in many ways, and information infrastructures play a critical role in ensuring the right information is available at the right time and the right place to support informed decision making. The traditional approach that assumes all information can be located on a single mainframe and accessed by everybody in the enterprise has fallen by the wayside, and new infrastructures supporting extended or virtual enterprises and globally distributed supply chains are becoming increasingly vital to successful, competitive organizations. Functions, data, and...

Since the first DIISM conference, which took place 9 years ago, the world has seen drastic changes, including the transformation of manufacturing and engineering software, and the information and communication technologies deployed. The conditions for manufacturing and engineering have changed on a large scale, in terms of technology-enabled collaboration among the fields of design, engineering, production, usage, maintenance and recyclingldisposal. These changes can be observed in rapidly-growing fields such as supply chain management. As for production technologies at factory floors, new...