Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing

This article is about a specific US Air Force program. For general information see Computer-Aided Manufacturing

Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) is a US Air Force program to develop tools, techniques, and processes to support manufacturing integration and has influenced the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) project efforts of many companies.

The ICAM program was founded in 1976 and initiative managed by the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson as a part of their technology modernization efforts. The program initiated the development a series of standard for modeling and analysis in management and business improvement, called Integrated Definitions", short IDEFs.

Overview

Dennis E. Wisnosky and Dan L. Shunk are recognized as co-founders of the ICAM program. Wisnosky is now the Chief Technical Officer of the United States Department of Defense Business Mission Area within the office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Business Transformation.

Dan Shunk and I founded the USAF ICAM program in 1976. At a critical point in the programs, I was asked, "Exactly how are you going to get from the factory to process and integrate all functions in between? "The factory, center, cell, station process concept was born. We published it as an upside-down pyramid-a wedge-- and focused all the factory on process.

— Dennis Wisnosky, Naperville, IL.

In the 1980s Joseph Harrington broadened the concept of CIM to include the entire manufacturing company. Harrington considered manufacturing a "monolithic function". This book discussed how the functions could interact as a seamless whole. Harrington was helpful to Wisnosky and Shunk in designing the USAF's ICAM program in the mid-1970's, and their work, in turn, influenced Harrington's second book.

The ICAM program was visionary in showing that a new approach was necessary to achieve integration in manufacturing firms. Wisnosky and Shunk developed a "wheel" to illustrate the architecture of their ICAM project and to show the various elements that had to work together. Wisnosky and Shunk were among the first to understand the web of interdependencies needed for integration. Their work represents the first major step in shifting the focus of manufacturing from a series of sequential operations to parallel processing.

The ICAM program has spent over $100 million to develop tools, techniques, and processes to support manufacturing integration and has influenced the CIM project efforts of many companies. The Air Force's ICAM program recognizes the role of data as central to any integration effort. Data is to be common and shareable across functions. The concept still remains ahead of its time, because most major companies will not seriously begin to attack the data architecture challenge until well into the 1990s. The ICAM program also recognizes the need for ways to analyze and document the major activities performed within the manufacturing establishment. Thus, from ICAM came the IDEFs, the standard for modeling and analysis in management and business improvement efforts. IDEF means ICAM DEFinition.

The impact

Standard data models

In order to get real meaning out of the data, we must also have formulated, and agreed on, a model of the world the data describes. We now understand that this actually involves two different kinds of model:

• the static associations between the data and the real-world physical and conceptual objects it describes, called the information model, and
• the rules for the use and modification of the data, which are derived from the dynamic characteristics of the objects themselves, called the functional model.

The significance of these models to data interchange for manufacturing and materials flow was recognized early in the Air Force Integrated Computer Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) Project and gave rise to the IDEF formal modeling project.. IDEF produced a specification for a formal functional modeling approach (IDEF0) and an information modeling language (IDEF1). The more recent "Product Data Exchange Specification" (PDES) project in the U.S., the related ISO Standard for the exchange of product model data (STEP) and the Computer Integrated Manufacture Open Systems Archictecture (CIMOSA) [ISO87] project in the European Economic Community have whole heartedly accepted the notion that useful data sharing is not possible without formal semantic data models of the context the data describes.

Within their respective spectra of efforts, each of these projects has a panoply of information models for manufactured objects, materials and product characteristics, and for manufacturing and assembly processes. Each also has a commitment to detailed functional models of the various phases of product life cycle. The object of all of these recent efforts is to standardize the interchange of information in many aspects of product design, manufacture, delivery and support.

Further research with ICAM Definitions

The research in expending and applying the ICAM Definitions have proceeded. In the 1990s for example the Material Handling Research Center (MHRC) of the Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Arkansas had included the it in there Information Systems reseach areau. That area focuses on the information that must accompany material movements and the application of artificial intelligence to material handling problems. MHRC's research involves expanding the integrated computer-aided manufacturing definition (IDEF) approach to include the information flow as well as the material flow needed to support a manufacturing enterprise, as well as models to handle unscheduled events such as machine breakdowns or material shortages. Past research resulted in software to automatically palletize random-size packages, a system to automatically load and unload truck trailers, and an integrated production control system to fabricate optical fibers.

See also

• CIMOSA
• IDEF

Further reading

• Charles Savage, 1996, Fifth Generation Management, Dynamic Teaming, Virtual Enterprising and Knowledge Networking, page 184, , ISBN 0750697016, Butterworth-Heinemann.
• Joseph Harrington (1984). Understanding the Manufacturing Process. ISBN 978-0824771706