This paper highlights the main aspects of a research program developed by the Dipartimento di Economia e Produzione of the Politecnico di Milano within the framework of a national research project on the Design and Management of Advanced Production Systems. The study aims at defining the general architecture of a workbench for the design of industrial production systems, identifYing appropriate problem-solving tools and developing a prototype-version of such a system. The approach followed by

more »

... e authors is based on a general descriptive method for generic production system definition, drawn from Zeigler's system entity structure. Based on this general concept, a two-stage design approach is proposed for the design and redesign activities of manufacturing systems. In the authors' opinion this kind of approach could remarkably improve the efficiency of manufacturing systems design and re-engineering tasks, which are major contributors to competitive success in modem industries worldwide. Keywords Object-oriented modelling of manufacturing systems, Manufacturing systems modelling, Computer-Aided Engineering, Design of manufacturing systems J. Browne et al. (eds.), Re-engineering the Enterprise