Trends and Prospect of Manufacturing Intelligence 3. the network and video system. In order to respond rapidly to the demands of market, a collaborative economy entity, virtual enter- prise, is constituted temporarily by different enterprises involved with the product, which transcends spatial constraints, and connects over network and to unified commands. Its features are virtualized functions, virtual- ized organizations and virtualized regions (Wang, 2006). Virtual manufacturing is the inevitable result of various information technology developments and the demands of modern enterprises. Networking a. Networking is a necessary road for the development of enterprises. Under the great pressure of fierce competition, each enterprise has to implement profound reforms of the manufacturing organization, and con- centrate on its own most competitive core business. Fortunately, this reform is made possible by computer tech- nology and network technology. In network manufacturing (NM), new network space combines closely with the traditional space to generate di- versified new thinking, new opinions, new methods and new systems. A new manufacturing mode, i.e., virtual manufacturing organization, `virtual enterprise' and dynamic `enterprise alliance' emerge. Each enterprise in a virtual enterprise concentrates on its own core business, complements advantages, and implements resource optimization, dynamic combining and sharing. b. Content of network manufacturing. This includes manufacturing envi- ronment networking, manufacturing enterprise networking, networking among enterprises, and the networking market. c. Distributed collaborative design adoption of grid technology. Grid technology is the main method of implementing resource sharing and integration between enterprise and society, and of providing an integrated supporting environment to the enter- prise group's collaborative operation and management. Currently, the main application of the grid is to integrate the dispersed computing ability. In the future, the grid will greatly satisfy the demand of network manufacturing. Enterprise, even individual, will obtain manufacturing service from network, as convenient as acquisition of water, electricity, gas and Internet informa- tion, in the future. REVIEWS ON FOREMENTIONED MI TECHNOLOGIES Over the past several years, the intelligent tech- nologies have been widely used in manufacturing aspects such as machine learning, planning and robotics, modeling human performance, expert systems, automated reasoning, etc. Many of these systems, such as advanced manufacturing sys- tems (AMS), computer integrated manufacturing (CIM), flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), manufacturing resource planning (MRPII), CAD/ CAM, numerical control machines are being de- veloped for production and operation management and present a cross fertilization of ideas from MI. Several MI technologies have been depicted in the previous chapters. And a brief review of these technologies will be presented in this section. Knowledge Based System As one of the MI technology, knowledge-based system, especially expert system, has played an important role in manufacturing, and been recog- 367