Japan’s Ministry of International Trade & Industry is preparing a proposal to European and US governments for a major international development project to design a next generation integrated manufacturing system, with the fruits of the development being shared by all participating countries: the 10-year project to develop an intelligent manufacturing system, embracing everything from sales order entry through design, manufacturing and production control, would be undertaken by research teams from the participants at a base in the US rather than Japan – the point of the exercise is to alleviate trade friction – and each participant would contribute its unique skills, MITI suggests, with Japan contributing machine tool technology, embracing numerical control, the US contributing software skills, and Europe precision process technology; MITI reckons the project should be budgeted at around $1,000m, and says that the Japanese government and industry would be prepared to shoulder $620m of the burden.
