Digital factories foster new vision of manufacturing: manufacturers trying to become dot-com companies are using simulation technology to overhaul production

摘要

The success of nontraditional or on-line companies such as Amazon.com has not been lost on what were once smokestack industries. If automakers, for example, want to act like nimble consumer-product manufacturers, they'll have to define their processes down to every movement of every robot and worker before bending metal for a new model. Automakers such as Ford and General Motors are going to give the effort a good shot. They'll do so by building digital factories at increasing rates in the computers of their production planners. Already software developers have written programs for modeling the work in a small cell as well as entire factories. But planners are thinking big with a vision that extends beyond their own plants to link into their supply chains. This is just one of the latest manufacturing trends.