Distributed information models and design decision optimization for electronics manufacturing

The growth and expansion of the manufacturing industry has seen a gradual shift in the structure and functioning of enterprises. While the idea of distributed and virtual enterprises is not new, it has come to mean different things depending upon the implementation and business environment. This work reflects a further extension of the distributed enterprise paradigm dubbed agile manufacturing, and serves to define and develop some of the key characteristics and interactions between participating distributed enterprises for electronics manufacturing.; Survival of electronics manufacturers in the face of increasing competition and constant technological advances depends upon a highly organized and efficient functioning of all the elements that contribute to the product realization cycle. The flow of information and the structure of information exchange elements are a primary business and engineering factor that is of paramount importance in a distributed manufacturing environment. A number of key services that support, at a higher level, organizational behavior and collaborative decision-making depend upon the accurate and effective development of distributed models. The estimation of manufacturing cost of different elements of final product is one such example, the modeling of which has taken many forms but has been consistently centralized.; This dissertation is directed towards the design and development of a generalized distributed modeling framework in a diverse electronics manufacturing business environment. It is proposed that in a constantly changing technological and horizontally expanding business environment, localized modeling of any significant portion of the product realization process yields inaccurate and misleading information. In addition, it has limited applicability and an extremely short lifetime. Further, when traversing organizational boundaries in developing information-based models, centralized modeling methods are hard pressed to accommodate issues regarding data ownership and confidentiality. The approach proposed describes a distributed modeling methodology that embraces these ideas to develop a framework of co-operating nodes along an information network, each of which provides modeling and other information services.