Distributed and Collaborative Manufacturing for the 21st Century

Abstract

Targeting at the emerging issues in recent years, manufacturing research has been focusing on improving flexibility, dynamism, agility and productivity for manufacturing in the 21st century, particularly in distributed and collaborative environments. Various Web-based and AI-based tools have been developed to deal with issues in process simulation, production planning, resource scheduling, and supply chain management. Many research projects have been devoted to improving product quality and manufacturing process efficiency targeting manufacturing uncertainty. This special issue titled "Distributed and Collaborative Manufacturing for the 21st Century" brings to the readers some of the state-of-the-art and new achievements in modern manufacturing research. There are nine papers in this special and their synopses are provided below.