Systems Engineering in the Manufacturing Domain of the Future

As systems become more and more complex and tools such as the PC, the Internet, and software become more powerful the desire and the need to integrate these systems across the enterprise will continue to grow. As large manufacturers continue to outsource more and more of their manufacturing they will need to have their subcontractors well integrated into their “virtual” enterprise. As pressure is placed on U.S. manufacturers to compete with offshore manufacturers they will not only need to be well integrated across the enterprise, they will also have to depend on technology and automation to remain competitive. Current trends in manufacturing are focused on integration of the design and manufacturing process while ERP systems focus various financial aspects of manufacturing. In the future all of these Business, Engineering, and Manufacturing process systems will need to be seamlessly integrated across the entire enterprise both virtual and real up and down the supply chain. Real‐time collaborative design and manufacturing processes will become the norm instead of the exception. Real‐time collaboration must occur independent of geographical and corporate boundaries. Engineers will send finished design files electronically directly to the manufacturing machine tools to begin production of products. Additional emphasis will be on the flexibility of manufacturers to quickly change designs and tooling to produce different parts and products in response to customer configuration needs. Systems engineers will have many challenges in the enterprises of the future based on the need to integrate a wide variety of enterprise hardware, software, network, and other systems. This panel session will address the evolution of the manufacturing domain, considering the past and present trends. The panel will provide their perspective on future manufacturing systems, and the challenges of engineering and integrating these systems into the enterprise be it a single corporation (a system) or a multi‐organization “virtual” enterprise (a system of system s). Systems engineers will be faced with significant increases in system complexity and in the varieties of systems and components. The distinguished and knowledgeable members of this panel come from a cross section of Government, academia, and private industry and each will bring very different views of the future of manufacturing and what that means to the systems engineers who will be challenged to architect, integrate, deploy, and maintain these systems.