Manufacturing and engineering in the information society: responding to global challenges

This introductory paper to the DIISM’04 volume explains the DIISM problem statement and applies principles of architecture descriptions for evolutionary systems (IEEE 1471–2000) to the information infrastructure for engineering and manufacturing. In our vision, knowledge and skill chains depend on infrastructure systems fulfilling missions in three kinds of environments: the socio-industrial domain of society and its production systems as a whole, the knowledge domain for a scientific discipline, and the sectorial domain, which includes the operational entities (companies, organizational units, engineers, workers) in engineering and manufacturing. The relationships between these different domains are captured in a domain paradigm An information infrastructure that enables responses to global challenges must draw on a wide range of both industrial and academic excellence, vision, knowledge, skill, and ability to execute. Responses have a scope, from the company, the factory floor and the engineering office to external collaboration and to man-system collaboration. In all scopes a system can offer services to different operational levels: operations, development or engineering, and research. The dimensions of scope and service level are briefly explained in relation to the architecting of an infrastructure. Papers are grouped according to their contribution to an infrastructure scenario or to an infrastructure component.