Many manufacturing processes have become fully automated resulting in high production volumes. However, this is not the case for inspection. Shortening the inspection times in manufacturing industry using the available information resources can result in the reduction of production lead-time and overall costs. Rapid advances in machine tool technology have resulted in fast processing Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines that are capable of manufacturing parts at high speeds, turning their manual inspection process into a bottleneck. However, many CNC machines record the operations that they perform as Realisation Logs. This paper proposes an approach that utilises these Realisation Logs for automating the inspection process. The automation occurs with the implementation of a software tool that imports and compares the Realisation Logs with the Manufacturing Instructions for a manufactured part. The output of the tool is an Inspection Report that lists all the identified skipped or mishandled operations for that part. The proposed inspection approach is compared with the manual practice within an Aerospace manufacturer. The results demonstrate drastic reduction in production lead-time while producing accurate and reliable Inspection Reports in an automated manner.

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SUMMARYArchives of software packages made available on the Internet have become an increasingly common and important way of distributing these resources. To improve local access speeds, it is common for these archives to be mirrored, i.e. replicated at regional sites throughout the world. When these sites are also active participants in the augmentation and maintenance of the archive, it becomes necessary to impose a regime which will ensure that errors and inconsistencies do not arise as a result of conflicting activities at different centres. We describe here procedures which have been developed for the organisation and management of a multi-site software archive in which items of software may be introduced or updated at any of the participating sites. A simple algorithm is outlined to propagate changes made to all sites, protecting against conflicting changes and ensuring consistency of the archive is maintained. Similar methods are applicable to the management of other kinds of distributed system, especially internet-based information services, including World Wide Web sites which allow regional updates.

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