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This paper describes results of work developed at INESC within the scope of the Esprit-5478 Shop-Control Project, as well as other related developments. The objective of the Shop-Control project1 has been to help SME's in reducing their operating expenses and enable them to deliver high quality products on schedule by providing them with an integrated shop floor control system. This system is built on an integrated set of shop floor application software packages interacting with the actual shop floor environment through factory data collection equipment and shop floor communication networks. The developed application packages include shop floor scheduling and dispatching, shop floor monitoring, supervision and alarm management, quality assurance and maintenance management. In this paper, the relevance of on-line shop floor data collection is put into focus and the underlying infrastructure is described. Information flow between interacting software applications is also presented, with a special emphasis for shop floor Supervision facilities. The integrated view on the shop floor which is achieved is of utmost importance in the support of shop floor management decision making in a wide range of end-user industries.

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