Production Organisation and Management (POM) represents the management of the factory of the future. It includes advanced process control, enterprise/ manufacturing simulation, (human) knowledge management, and human-computer interaction at the organisational, enterprise level. This cluster deals with the management of operations ranging from concept to disposal within the organisation to incorporate the functions of innovation, planning, organising, scheduling and controlling of production processes and the management of the interface with extended enterprise and other supporting functions. Two key themes are identified:

• Cost-effective and rapid reconfiguration of the Factory requires the development of organisational strategies to enable rapid self-reconfiguration in response to changing business and value driver requirements, combining so-called ‘Fit Manufacturing’ and ‘Virtual Enterprise’ paradigms. This theme includes the rapid assembly of geographically distributed modular manufacturing units into a virtual Autonomous Factory, and cost-efficiency/flexibility/responsiveness of manufacturing systems through collaborative and distributive design, resource and production planning and scheduling. It also embraces, in collaboration with the Production and Automation and Control cluster, such items as Dynamic Planning & Scheduling for Reconfigurable and Fail-safe Production, Internet-enabled Monitoring and Control, and Multi-criterion and In-process quality control based on advanced sensors.
• Integration of human and technical resources is required to enable effective collaboration between man and machine. This includes effective human-computer interaction by means of multimodal/multimedia knowledge-based user interfaces, with active knowledge access and adaptive, dynamic knowledge presentation. More fundamental, however, is efficient manufacturing knowledge management, both the capturing human knowledge in a useable way, and the conversion of stored information to knowledge through AI-based knowledge extraction methods, supported by on-line, intelligent decision/performance support systems.