Digital factory - planning and running enterprises of the future

This paper describes an innovative approach to factory automation - the digital factory. The first part gives a short overview of current CIM (computer integrated manufacturing) and CAPE (computer-aided production engineering) tools. The second part specifies the concepts "virtual engineering", "digital mock-up" and "digital factory" and introduces a method which links several CIM/CAPE tools together using a shared product/process data management system. Finally, we present a new distributed, scalable, Internet-based tele-diagnosis and monitoring system for robots and robot cells.