Complexity, Reliability, and Design: Manufacturing Implications

This paper presents some interesting and new ideas about the nature of the forces driving the worldwide trend toward flexible automation. It suggests, in brief, that the demand for computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) arises from what Nathan Rosenberg has termed a "mismatch", that is, a problem that was created, in effect, by technological progress itself. In this case the "problem" is that defects in manufacturing have become intolerable. The reason for this is that demand of higher and higher levels of product performance, over many decades, has required orders-of-magnitude increases in mechanical complexity, on the one hand, and higher precision, on the other. To satisfy these high standards requires a level of error control that increasingly precludes the use of human workers in direct contact with workpieces as the move through the manufacturing system