This paper considers a supply chain that comprises multiple independent and autonomous enterprises (project managers) that seek and select various contractors to complete operations of their project. Both the project managers and contractors jointly determine the schedules of their operations while no single enterprise has complete information of other enterprises. The centralized scheduling approach that can usually obtain good global performance but must share nearly complete information that is difficult or even impractical due to the distributed nature of real-life supply chains. This paper proposes an agent-based supply chain model to support distributed scheduling. A modified contract-net protocol (MCNP) is proposed to enable more information sharing among the enterprises than conventional CNP. Experimental simulation studies are conducted to compare and contrast the performances of the centralized [centralized heuristic (CTR)], conventional CNP, and MNCP approaches. The results show that MCNP outperforms CNP and performs comparably with CTR when project complexity is high in terms of the total supply chain operating cost. Moreover, it is found that although CTR is better than MCNP in terms of global performance, MCNP yields good schedule stability when facing unexpected disturbances.

POPIM (Pragmatic Online Project Information Management) is a prototype Web-based platform for managing collaborative product development projects within an extended enterprise environment. A suite of facilities are provided for geographically dispersed project team members to communicate, share, and collaborate on a project in a common workspace where they enjoy online access to the most up to date project information and maintain a high-level data consistency and accumulate experience and a knowledge-base. In addition to standard project management functionality such as defining work structure breakdowns, determining work schedules, teaming up with specialists, and allocating resources, POPIM incorporates workflow management (including dependency management), and deliverable management (document management if documents are considered as one kind of deliverables). Individual members have their personalized accounts according to their skills and roles/responsibilities in a project. A project team and its members may maintain their own journals/records. More application-specific functions such as product design review and engineering change management can be implicitly performed through online document forms.

Product design review is one of the typical scenarios of collaborative product development. We developed a Web-based prototype framework for supporting collaborative tele-product design review on the Internet. It provides a suite of tools to establish and manage the new product design review process. The paper discusses the issues related to the development and implementation of Web applications in prototype implication. The typical 3-tier architecture is explained to show how the CyberReview components work together to achieve the intended functionality. VRML EAI and Java Applet-Servlet pair technology was included to support the implication.

Recent applications of robots for industrial automation have shown significant improvement in manufacturing processes in terms of reducing labor participation, enhancing flexibility, efficiency and quality of the products. However, most applications are limited to point-to-point and noninteractive operations in which the availability of a highly structured setup is a prerequisite. This prompts the vast emergency of researches on intelligent robotics that are aimed to improve the adaptability, flexibility and dexterity so as to enhance the intelligence of industrial robots. This paper investigates the designs of intelligent robotic systems and discusses the proposed criteria required to achieve an intelligent robotic system. A proposed conceptual framework for robotic assembly is then presented that contains two main parts, namely, a robotic state recognizer and a control strategy generator. In addition to these two components, the integration of compliant motion control into the framework will be described. An example of using the proposed framework to develop a robotic assembly system is given.