The proposed project aims to study, develop and realize a system integrating new woodworking machinery with open architecture advanced distributed information system and machine vision. ATM technology will be used as the communication backbone for agile manufacturing of furniture in a JIT enterprise.

From the other side, a new generation of flexible machinery for production of the different kinds of wood products will be studied, developed and realized. The machines will be able to operate in a “stand-alone” mode performing all the operations of the woodworking process with very advanced performance and will be able to be integrated/implemented at any level of integration in more complex systems. The ability to adapt to possible future technological developments will be a major factor in the design of the machines to be developed in the project.

The quality of product/process will be warranted by the integration of automated quality inspection systems that will provide continuous feedback to the real time production management system. The production management system will dynamically reschedule the production tasks, distributing the workload among the different machines in the plant. The vision technology will also be used for providing feedback to the controllers of the CNC machines for dynamic adaptation of the tool paths.