Controlling Plant-Floor Activities in an E-Manufacturing Enterprise

The Internet has been transforming the business world with the Web-based and customer-oriented technologies. It is anticipated the front-end ordering capability of e-commerce will one day be converged with the back-end execution processes of the production plants. So manufacturers will be able to handle business at the speed of the Internet. The paper reports an effort to construct a J2EE-based e-manufacturing system. In this design, the front end ordering system, the middle layer distributed virtual enterprise, and the production control systems are integrated using Java technologies. The plant-floor control is simulated in a virtual manufacturing cell and the verified operation plan can be transferred to a java-enabled real manufacturing cell.