It is our pleasure to invite you to the Industry Innovation Meeting "Integrated Information and Control Systems for Smarter Enterprise" (IICS 2012) to be held in Bucharest on May 24-25, 2012, an associate event of the 14th IFAC Symposium "Information Control Problems in Manufacturing" (INCOM'12).

This Workshop is organized by the Centre of Research in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics (CIMR) in collaboration with the IFAC TC 5.1 and TC 5.2, with support from the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, the General Association of Engineers in Romania (AGIR), the Robotics Society of Romania (SRR), the Romanian Society of Automation and Technical Informatics (SRAIT) and the General Confederation of the Romanian Industrial Employers (UGIR-1903).

Well-known industrial leaders, solutions providers and integrators of automation and information systems are expected on site, for best practice presentations and exchange of ideas in two main areas: (i) development of integrated engineering and product life-cycle management and (ii) IT systems and their impact on firm's performances or process management.

The theme of the IICS Workshop associated to INCOM'12 is "Instrumented, Interconnected and Intelligent Manufacturing for Smarter Enterprise", bringing into discussion the state-of-the-art, existing technologies, enterprise solutions, best practices and future trends for sustainable manufacturing through agile shop floors and supply chains, service oriented architectures and integrated information and control systems.

Recent developments in information and control technologies have significantly modified the business organization of enterprises and the way they work together to create value. New forms of production planning, scheduling, control and monitoring bridge the gap between business processes and manufacturing execution at enterprise level. The working environment and resources are more and more instrumented; resources are now able to communicate intensively which allows intelligent production and supply chain configuring, automatic control, adaptation to disturbances and traceability. The evolvement from single enterprise with a high vertical range of manufacture towards enterprise networks offers new business opportunities especially for small and medium enterprises that are usually more flexible than larger companies are.

Manufacturing companies are facing many new challenges today to become more flexible and agile as business models and market demands change. Companies’ ability to adapt quickly to a changing business environment mainly depends on the agility of their shop floors, flexibility of their business processes and interoperability of their IT and automation system(s) they employ.

One driver of business change is the increasing number of regulations that government and other agencies have imposed to manufacturing and supply companies. Another business shift or trend, requiring flexibility today is the use of many different suppliers to manufacture the end product. In order to maintain profitability, companies need to seamlessly and securely integrate their IT systems to suppliers’ in order to track product, supplies, schedules, etc. The IT systems of both OEM and supplier need to be flexible enough to handle different requirements as different suppliers and OEMs do business. One technology or architecture that helps companies with this problem is called SOA or Service Oriented Architecture. SOA, used in combination with Rapid Deployment Automation (RDA), agent orientation and appropriate industry standards (ISA-95 Enterprise Domain Model, Manufacturing 2.0, a.o.) allows for a plug-and-play type of architecture for IT and automatic control systems.

Rapid Deployment Automation allows adding intelligence and environmental adaptation to manufacturing resources (machines, sensors, equipment, computers) which can be integrated in teams, and Manufacturing 2.0 SOA allows the IT system’s functionality to be added, changed or removed quickly as market demands require business changes.

• Integrated Engineering in Practice
• Supply Chains and Logistics
• Distributed Process Control and Networking
• Multi-Agent Technologies for Industrial Systems
• Monitoring, Diagnosis and Maintenance in Process Automation
• Sustainable Product Design and Lifecycle Management
• Information based Medicine and Healthcare Services
• Dynamic and Green Infrastructure for Sustainable Business
• Business Process Modelling and Information System Design
• Information Systems for Enterprise
• Business Analytics and Optimization for Decision Support
• Service Oriented Architectures
• Web Services and Wireless Automation
• Industrial Applications of Continuous and Discrete-Event Process Control
• Integrated Design and Virtual Reality
• Robot Integration in Manufacturing and Mechatronics

The IICS 2012 Industry Innovation Meeting should assemble participants from industry, developers and academia around two themes:

• May 24, the "Automation" day will be focused on process automation systems and enterprise integration solutions.

It concerns with priority engineering, design and maintenance departments, integrators of automation technologies, production and supply companies. It will give the occasion to discuss the application and trends of process automation, integrated engineering, product design and virtual reality, service orientation of manufacturing and supply chains, mechatronics for SMEs and agent-based technologies for industrial systems.

• May 25, the "Information" day will deal with various aspects of enterprise information systems, software technologies and networking solutions.

It concerns with priority ITC departments, software architects, developers and integrators for enterprise applications, global business solution departments. The presentations will focus on Information Management, Business Analytics and Optimization, Services Computing including Web services, SOA, ESB and Cloud services for enterprise business management.