13th IFAC Workshop on
Intelligent Manufacturing Systems
Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, 12-14 August 2019

Chair’s Remarks

The 13th Workshop of International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) on Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS 2019) was held in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, and hosted by the University of  Ontario Institute of Technology (Ontario Tech) from 12th to 14th of August 2019. IMS is mainly sponsored by the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Working Group of the IFAC’s Technical Committee on Manufacturing Plant Control, IFAC TC 5.1. In addition, IMS 2019 was cosponsored by the other IFAC’s Technical Committees including IFAC TC 4.2 - Mechatronics Systems, IFAC TC 4.5 - Human Machine Systems, IFAC TC 5.2 -Manufacturing Modelling for Management and Control, and IFAC TC 5.3 - Enterprise Integration and Networking. The IFAC Workshops on Intelligent Manufacturing Systems brings together researchers and experts from the academia and industry to present the state-of-the-art in intelligent manufacturing systems to provide stimulating opportunities for initiating fruitful relationships and ambitious projects. The thirteen IMS Workshops were held as follows:

• 13th IFAC Workshop on IMS, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, 12-14 August 2019.
• 12th IFAC Workshop on IMS, Austin, United States, 5-7 Dec 2016.
• 11th IFAC Workshop on IMS, São Paulo, Brazil, 22-24 May 2013.
• 10th IFAC Workshop on IMS, Lisbon, Portugal, 1-2 July 2010.
• 9th IFAC/IFIP Workshop on IMS, Szczecin, Poland, 9-10 October 2008.
• 8th IFAC Workshop on IMS, Alicante, Spain, 23-25 May 2007.
• 7th IFAC Workshop on IMS, Budapest, Hungary, 6-8 April 2003.
• 6th IFAC/IFORS/IFIP Workshop on IMS, Poznan, Poland, 24-26 April 2001.
• 5th IFAC Workshop on IMS, Gramado, Brazil, 9-11 November 1998.
• 4th IFAC Workshop on IMS, Seoul, Korea, 21-23 July 1997.
• 3rd IFAC/IFIP Workshop on IMS, Bucharest, Romenia, 24-26 October 1995.
• 2nd IFAC Workshop on IMS, Vienna, Austria, 13-15 June 1994.
• 1st IFAC International Workshop on IMS, Dearborn, USA, 1-2 October 1992.

IMS 2019 was a very successful event structured with parallel and individual scientific tracks. The IMS 2019’s seventeen Sessions included eight plenary and regular Sessions, and nine invited Sessions, where the worldwide recognized scientists and industry professionals presented their latest research and development results.

IMS 2019 had a specific attention to the latest innovations, on-going efforts and the best practices in experiencing the Industry 4.0 era, smart factory and its cyber-physical systems, intelligent inspection to monitor the manufacturing health, and on-demand and customized manufacturing with additive.  Participants identified new initiatives, applications, and research advances in the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, and demonstrate the ready-to-deploy technologies. There were numerous opportunities for networking and discussing the collaborative opportunities.

An exceptional International Program Committee was formed for IMS 2019, with 36 members from 15 countries. Several IFAC International Journals were associated to the workshop supporting the publication of the best quality papers presented in the workshop. In total, the International Program Committee received over 94 submissions contributed by authors from many countries worldwide. Following a comprehensive peer review process considering the technical merits and the strict relevance to the scope of the workshop, the International Program Committee selected only 70 articles. The topics of the contributions accepted range from case studies of particular manufacturing processes, through mathematical models of intelligent manufacturing systems. Nine invited sessions were organized within IMS 2019, including:

• Miniature Manufacturing and Intelligent Surfaces Engineering
• Smart Machining
• Additive manufacturing for on-demand production and personalized products (I)
• Additive manufacturing for on-demand production and personalized products (II)
• Enterprise Maturity Driven Planning for Sustainable Manufacturing Systems (I)
• Enterprise Maturity Driven Planning for Sustainable Manufacturing Systems (II)
• Digital twins for smart manufacturing
• Smart production control for Industry 4.0 (I)
• Smart production control for Industry 4.0 (II)

Overall, IMS 2019 have been evaluated a very successful event by the participants and experts in providing a platform for discussing high level recent research and development in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems. We would like to express our gratitude to all the people who worked in this promising event.

September 2019,  National Organizing Committee Chairs
Ahmad Barari
Marcos S G Tsuzuki