The purpose of this research is to investigate and establish a common decision-making framework to be utilized in manufacturing systems. Specifically, the research addresses three areas of the system of manufacturing: product design, production planning, and process control. The attempt is to utilize that framework as an integrating vehicle for these three areas so that the total development and production cycle of the product gets substantially reduced, and the entire manufacturing system becomes more efficient. The approach taken in this work is an interdisciplinary one, where diverse knowledge from manufacturing engineering operations research and artificial intelligence is brought together to establish and investigate common decision-making methodology for manufacturing systems.
