Operation of a Networked Virtual Manufacturing System using Quasi-Procedural Method

Nowadays, one of the major technical issues in manufacturing is to create an environment to promote collaboration among diverse engineering activities. Collaborative engineering is an innovative approach integrating widely distributed engineering activities through promoting information sharing and actual collaboration. It requires close interactions among developers, suppliers and customers, and consideration of entire product life cycle from concept to disposal. A carefully-designed operating system is crucial for successful collaboration of many different activities in a Networked Virtual Manufacturing System(NVMS). High extensibility, flexibility and efficiency ale the key characteristics requested of an operating system to handle the complexity of the NVMSs. In this paper, we propose a model of the operating system for collaborative engineering using concurrent quasi-procedural method(QPM). QPM is a goal-driven data management technique for distributed and parallel computing environments. It is to be applied to the evaluation of activities to be executed, validities of input data, execution path of activities for a needed output, and expected to greatly improve the productivity of operations by preventing redundant evaluations. Collaboration among many different engineering activities in NVMSs is to be performed by the network of agents that encapsulate the capabilities of both users and their tools.