Manufacturing has been one of the key areas that support and influence a nation’s economy since the 18th century. Being the primary driving force in economic growth, manufacturing constantly serves as the foundation of and contributes to other industries with products ranging from heavy-duty machinery to hi-tech home electronics. In the past centuries, manufacturing has contributed significantly to modern civilisation and created momentum that is used to drive today’s economy. Despite various revolutionary changes and innovations in the 20th century that contributed to manufacturing advancements, we are still facing new challenges when striving to achieve greater success in winning global competitions. Today, distributed manufacturing is unforeseeably coming into being due to recent business decentralisation and manufacturing outsourcing. Manufacturers are competing in a dynamic marketplace that demands short response time to changing markets and agility in production. In the 21st century, manufacturing is gradually shifting to a distributed environment with increasing dynamism. In order to win a competition, locally or globally, customer satisfaction is treated with priority. This leads to mass customisation and even more complex manufacturing processes, from shop floors to every level along manufacturing supply chains. At the same time, outsourcing has forged a multi-tier supplier structure with numerous small-- medium-sized enterprises involved, where highly-mixed products in small batch sizes are handled simultaneously in job-shop operations.

Lihui Wang is a professor of virtual manufacturing at the University of Skövde’s Virtual Systems Research Centre in Sweden. He was previously a senior research scientist at the Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Institute, National Research Council of Canada. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at the University of Western Ontario, and a registered professional engineer in Canada. His research interests and responsibilities are in web-based and sensor-driven real-time monitoring and control, distributed machining process planning, adaptive assembly planning, collaborative design, supply chain management, as well as intelligent and adaptive manufacturing systems. Dr Weiming Shen is an Senior Research Officer in the Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Institute, National Research Council of Canada. He is also an Adjunct Full Professor of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research interests are in Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Concurrent Engineering, Collaborative Design and Manufacturing, Virtual Design and Manufacturing, Virtual Enterprises and Supply Chain Management, e-Commerce / e-Businesses, and Knowledge-Based Systems.