This Proceedings contains the papers presented at the 6th IFAC Workshop on Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, held in Poznan, Poland in April 2001. The Workshop followed the well-established tradition of such meetings organised under the sponsorship of the IFAC Technical Committee on the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (TC MIT), addressing key areas of scientific research and industrial applications in intelligent manufacturing systems.
The papers in the Proceedings cover topics such as case studies of particular manufacturing processes, rapid prototyping, new concepts for the technical support of intelligent manufacturing, and methodological aspects of distributed and discrete-event systems. A number of contributions reflect the truly international character of the research in this area.
Two promising technologies have generated a considerable amount of attention in the IMS community; multi-agents systems, which originate with the distributed artificial intelligence community as a software technology, and holonic manufacturing systems, which have emerged directly from the IMS community as a manufacturing technology.
This Proceedings will be indispensable for anyone with an interest in the latest developments in intelligent manufacturing systems.