Abstract
This article presents a framework to an Industrial Engineering and Management Science course from School of Management and Industrial Studies using Autonomous Ground Vehicles (AGV) to supply materials to a production line as an experimental setup for the students to acquire knowledge in the production robotics area. The students must be capable to understand and put into good use several concepts that will be of utmost importance in their professional life such as critical decisions regarding the study, development and implementation of a production line. The main focus is a production line using AGVs, where the students are required to address several topics such as: sensors actuators, controllers and an high level management and optimization software. The presented framework brings to the robotics teaching community methodologies that allow students from different backgrounds, that normally don't experiment with the robotics concepts in practice due to the big gap between theory and practice, to go straight to "making" robotics. Our aim was to suppress the minimum start point level thus allowing any student to fully experience robotics with little background knowledge.

Abstract
Industrial managers are in the expectation that the new generation factories bring more competitiveness to the manufacturing companies through innovative approaches, methods and tools that support the factory planning process. The concept of "factory as a product" perceives the factory as a complex long life product introducing design advantages for factory planning and optimization, seeking to improve quality, reduce ramp-up, product delivery and overall reduce time and costs. In order to attain these objectives, there is an urgent need for an innovative and suitable Virtual Factory Framework to structure the development of new generation factories. © 2010 IFAC.

Abstract
The paper underlines the interest of using a performance management system applied to monitor the strategy effectiveness and the interoperation's performance in the collaborative networks (CN). The aim with this study is to verify if a performance management system helps decision-makers reach the alignment among participants in a collaborative network. It is expected that this work provides an adequate tool for supporting quick decisions to meet the feasible and desirable improvements in inter-organisational processes. A framework (CNPMS) is also presented, having been developed to support the dynamic performance management, which was applied in case studies of two Brazilian collaborative networks.

Abstract
In order to fulfill all challenges related to design, management, evaluation and reconfiguration of new or existing facilities, the development of a new, integrated and holistic factory framework is required. In this context, a new requirements model is proposed in the context of the innovative framework called Virtual Factory Framework. Using this approach in factory planning it is expected to improve the ability to generate better and more sustainable solutions over the entire factory life-cycle. This paper underlines the use of the life-cycle paradigm in order to enable the future factory planning approaches.

Abstract
There has been extensive research on workload and input-output control with the objective of improving manufacturing operations in job-shops. In this paper, a multiple decision-making scheme is proposed to plan and control operations in a general job-shop, and to improve delivery and workload related performance measures. The job-shop characteristics reinforce the need for designing a global system that controls both the jobs entering (order acceptance, due date setting and job release) and the work-in-process (dispatching), leading to an improvement of operational measures. Previous research has concentrated on scheduling a set of orders through the shop floor, according to some decision mechanism, in order to optimise some measure of performance (usually total lead time). This means that, since only a part of the decision-making system is being optimised, the resulting decision may be sub-optimal. In this paper it is shown that the performance of the different decision rules changes when they are considered simultaneously. Hence, a higher level approach, where the four decisions (order acceptance, due date setting, job release and dispatching) are considered at the same time, should be adopted to improve job-shop operational performance.

Abstract
Work flows in a job-shop are determined not only by the release load but also by the number of accepted orders. In this paper the common assumption of accepting all incoming orders regardless of shop condition is relaxed. Instead of placing the orders in a 'pre-shop pool' queue, as in previous research, orders that arrive at the shop, when it is highly congested, may be immediately rejected or their due dates may be negotiated. This paper explores the idea of controlling the workload since the acceptance/rejection stage. A new acceptance/rejection rule is proposed, and tests are conducted to study the sensitivity of job-shop performance to different order acceptance parameters, like the tolerance of the workload limit and the due date extension acceptance. The effect of the negotiation phase on the job-shop performance is evaluated using a simulation model of a generic random job-shop that allow us to conclude that having a negotiation phase prior to rejection improves almost all workload performance measures. Different tolerances of the workload limit slightly affect the performance of the job-shop.