-In the last years we have assisted to several and deep changes in industrial manufacturing. Induced by the need of increasing efficiency, bigger flexibility, better quality and lower costs, it became more complex. The complexity of this new scenario has caused big pressure under enterprises production systems and consequently in its maintenance systems. Manufacturing systems recognize high level costs due equipment breakdown, motivated by the time spent to repair, which corresponds to no production time and scrapyard, and also money spent in repair actions. Usually, enterprises do not share data produced from their maintenance interventions. This investigation intends to create an organizational architecture that integrates data produced in factories on their activities of reactive, predictive and preventive maintenance. The main idea is to develop a decentralized predictive maintenance system based on data mining concepts. Predicting the possibility of breakdowns with bigger accuracy will increase systems reliability.

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The Montesinho Natural Park (PNM , Parque NaIl/rat de Montesinho) is a protected area located in the municipalities of Vinhais and Braganc;a, in the administrative NUT Alto Tras-os-Montes (PTlI8), the mountainous region of northeast Portugal. Most of the territory is in two areas, both below l,OOO m. The largest one is between 700 ami 1,000 m, where 1110st of the plateau lies. It is well defined in J. Castro (0) Instituto Polilecn ico de Bragan<;a,

This paper presents the concept of Autonomous Production Systems (APS), which are the organizational units upon which enterprises can be built and managed in order to better face the globalization challenges. We believe that companies organized as networks of APSs are better prepared to respond to the new economy challenges than organized in a hierarchical fashion. The way a traditional company can be reorganized in terms of a network of APSs using decentralized management is also explored in this article. We propose an approach to create and operate Virtual Enterprises either based on APSs or based on traditional companies. A Production Planning and Control system to operate Virtual Enterprises is also proposed in this paper using the concept of Bill of Materials and Movements.

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