Intelligent manufacturing: New advances and challenges

Excerpt

Since its humble infancy to turn a natural resource into a valuable product in the most economic, efficient, and effective way, manufacturing has been extensively practiced so as to optimize the interplay among people, machines, and materials. In the past decades, remarkable achievements have been witnessed in computation and communication technologies, facilitating the applicability of more sophisticated system configurations and requirements. At the same time, the maturity of manufacturing technologies has in turn spawned the continuing conception, development, and deployment of new relevant applications such as warehouse, logistics, and energy. All these stimulate researchers to keep working for decades to integrate recent achievements into production processes, envisaging more advancements and developments of intelligent manufacturing. …