From the title of this work, one might expect a textbook, but actually the materials consist of a brief introduction by the editors followed by papers presented at the 2002 International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Fifth International Working Conference of Information Infrastructure Systems for Manufacturing. The following paragraph from the book’s back cover offers a description of its content.
This book explores knowledge and skill chains in engineering and manufacturing in the age of global communications. Information infrastructure involves a range of activities from product planning, engineering, and manufacturing through transportation, marketing, and repair/upgrade to returns and recycling/disposal . . . Several authors address the architecture of the information infrastructure, its services and its requirements. Other papers focus on the knowledge and skill chains that develop in a variety of situations: the supply chain, the factory floor, [and] the man-system interaction . . . This book will be essential reading and reference for all researchers, engineers, and managers concerned with business models of, and IT support for, virtual enterprises and manufacturing networks. It presents a comprehensive text on information infrastructure for manufacturing and enterprise integration, modeling methodologies, and applications of information and telecommunication technologies.
More specifically, the book is a collection of 42 papers grouped into several major topic areas as follows (please note that the papers grouped under these topics vary in content more broadly than there is space to describe). “Generic Infrastructure Requirements and Components” discusses knowledge management in, and modeling of, manufacturing support systems. “External Collaboration” outlines ways for several companies to share information of various types. “Factory Floor Infrastructure” goes into process control and scheduling, and is oriented toward multicompany operations. “Man-System Collaboration” discusses human-system interactions in a manufacturing setting.
The book presents a challenge to the reader: many of its papers were written by authors for whom English is a second language. In addition, there is an obvious lack of proofreading. Many of the papers are rife with misspellings and problematic word use, making comprehension difficult. Beyond that, most papers are short, averaging about five pages in length including diagrams. In general, this means devoting about a page each to goals, methods, and results. This brevity offers only a high-level view, and can make it difficult for the reader to validate the authors’ claims. A few of the papers deal with theory, but the majority describe practical applications of systems dealing with knowledge management, collaboration, process control, and man-system interaction.
The claims made for the book on its back cover are only partly true. The book can be useful for someone interested in the general area of computer systems used in manufacturing in order to get an overview of activities being carried out in the topic areas mentioned above, but the content cannot be regarded as “comprehensive,” at least in terms of depth of coverage. Follow-up will be required to get into any level of detail for a particular topic, although the papers do provide references for such research. Finally, it is worth noting that the materials presented here are now about three years old.
