Subject Area

Example of Research Needed

Architectures and standards

Standard manufacturing control architectures Generic functionality within control architectures Cost-benefit criteria for potential standards

Intra-enterprise and inter-enterprise integration

Principles and architectures for coupling network-based applications

Automatic interpretation of transactions

Automatic message routing and associated processing

Support for multiple protocols and multiple speeds over a given medium

Time-critical message delivery in interconnected networks

Protocols and services that support specific demands of object-oriented applications

Services for human- and machine-based browsing and searching of information and resources

Tools and techniques supporting supply-chain dynamics and associated planning

Mechanisms and systems to support information session management

Architectures for autonomy and distributed intelligence

Autonomous agents to monitor and respond to production events

Knowledge agents for enterprise-wide management of models, names, transactions, and rules

Architectures for manufacturing systems involving distributed intelligence

Tools to find and distribute information

Stable sets of rules for interacting agents

Dynamic variations in agent autonomy

Information retrieval systems

Modeling and prototyping functions for user interfaces

Next-generation data manipulation languages

Maintenance of data consistency and integrity through database updates

Network-based services for information browsing and searching

Software engineering

Simplification of system designs, operation, and maintenance

Self-healing systems

Support for new programming paradigms

Tools for component-based architecture life-cycle approaches

General tools unconstrained by the limitations of specific programming languages

Tools with aspects of knowledge-based collaboration software