IM - April 95: Things to Come



Intelligent Manufacturing € April € 1995 € Vol. 1 € No. 4


The Shape of Manufacturing
Things to Come


By David Blanchard
Editor


The most important technology for manufacturers in the upcoming years is software, according to a Delphi study conducted by the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (Ann Arbor, Mich.). More significantly, the types of software manufacturers will be most concerned with are those we think of as "intelligent," i.e., neural networks, autonomous agents, expert systems, chaos theory, object-oriented, etc.

According to Dick Morley, president of Flavors Technology (Manchester, N.H.) and the keynote speaker at the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Conference held last month in Cleveland, Ohio, "Only one thing creates wealth - technology and the ability to use it. In ten years, computers will be 100 times more powerful than they are now, at one/tenth of the cost."

Morley, a well-traveled technology futurist, expounded on the Japanese view of manufacturing in the first decade of the next century:

"Even here in the U.S., people are talking seriously now about automobiles being manufactured right at the dealership," Morley said, "in a room no larger than a typical meeting room."

Fanciful predictions are part and parcel of a futurist's resume, and yet Morley's remarks were grounded in the real world. Speaking to an audience made up of manufacturing personnel, Morley reminded them, "This year's profit is based on decisions you made five to seven years ago." Whether we're able or willing to accept that ours is the Age of Information is beside the point. "Embrace the technology and embrace the future," Morley urged, "because that's where you're going to live."


Shifting Paradigms
Technology can be a ruthlessly ambiguous concept, however. In a very real sense, for many manufacturers technology is just another way of referring to what your competitor has, but you don't. The question on the minds of the conference attendees was, "Why should we invest in a new technology when we're just barely able to manage day-to-day operations as it is now?"

Attempting to answer that, James Heaton, president of AMR Consulting ( Boston, Mass.), took a matter-of-fact approach to the situation. "Paradigm shifts only result when there is sufficient dissatisfaction with existing technologies, and there is an acceptable alternative," he said.

Heaton's view of computer technologies focuses on three application paradigms:

"The paradigm shift from Phase One to Phase Two is so dramatic," Heaton warned, "that if your competitor gets a year and a half ahead of you, you may never be able to catch up." However, he continued, the amount of time and money a manufacturer has invested into existing technology inhibits them from pursuing newer technologies. Once a company reaches a certain size - becomes respected and successful, in other words - its very size becomes an anchor weighing down its chances of becoming even more successful.

Addressing this paradox, Mark Roth, president of Framework Technologies (Wellesley, Mass.), emphasized that the important point is not the technology - "It's how are we going to make it work. The problem is adoption."

Continuing this theme, Roth stated, "We need to design systems that accept the new and emerging technologies and then improve upon them by adapting them to existing manufacturing requirements." He predicted that manufacturing system architectures will need to be decentralized, asynchronous, agent-based, and self-organized.

Such systems include the bleeding-edge technology known in some quarters as holonics (see sidebar), which is an attempt to craft software that, like natural creatures, learns from its mistakes and past behavior to improve its performance over time. Holonics embraces the idea that a complex system that works has to begin with a simple system that works.

According to Odo Struger, vice president of technology at Allen-Bradley (Milwaukee, Wis.), the technological growth worldwide is moving toward holonic systems. Struger sees some of the major technological challenges for the early part of the 21st Century to be:

Extrapolating from the current rate of growth in computing speed and performance, Struger predicted that by the year 2020, computers could be as powerful as the human brain. By the year 2040, computers could begin to reach beyond the capacity of the human brain. What will be lagging behind, however, is the software.


What Does It All Mean?
So what does the advent of technological change mean for manufacturers? Besides the inevitable pitches from consultants and vendors to invest in their particular vision of the future, a few pearls of wisdom came from David Goselin, vice president of operations at AEG Schneider Automation (North Andover, Mass.). To be effective in any technology shift, Goselin said, "You have to have a vision, and it has to be shared company-wide. To be effective, you must qualify the process, not just the product."

In a similar vein, Ernie Vahala, retired group director for General Motors and the current president of the Auto Body Consortium, pointed out, "Here in the U.S., we're great innovators, but lousy implementers when it comes to technology. For manufacturers to accept any kind of change, they have to see evidence of its benefits in operation."

There are plenty of vendors out there, very ready and willing to urge you on to the next level of technology. The most important lesson is: Make sure you're ready for that next level, and make sure it's the right level for your company's needs.


Holons: The (W)hole Story

What is a holon?
According to Odo Struger, vice president of technology at Allen-Bradley (Milwaukee, Wis.) and a member of the Holonic Manufacturing Systems Consortium, a holon is an autonomous, cooperating agent. The word itself derives from a description of cellular automata in The Ghost in the Machine (1989, Arkana Books) by Arthur Koestler, coined as a compound of "hol" from "holistic" (meaning "whole") and "on" (meaning "particle") from "proton" or "neutron."


What is a holonic manufacturing system?
According to Max Winkler of the University of Hannover (Germany), holonic manufacturing systems are considered as a promising answer to many requirements related to production and manufacturing. The ultimate aim is the development of an architecture for highly decentralized manufacturing systems, built from a modular mix of (semi-)standardized, autonomous, cooperative and intelligent elements.


What is the HMS Consortium?
From the HMS WorldWideWeb page (http://www.gse.rmit.edu.au), maintained by David Chia at RMIT University (Australia), comes the following information:

The Holonic Manufacturing System (HMS) Consortium Technical Plan addresses research, pre-competitive development, systematization, and standardization of architecture and technology for open, distributed, intelligent, autonomous, cooperating ("holonic") systems for application in intelligent manufacturing systems encompassing discrete, continuous, and/or batch processing. The consortium's principal goal is to establish technological and organizational bases for the development, implementation, world-wide deployment and support of holonic manufacturing systems.


Who are the partners in the HMS projects?



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