I. Reading.

Ex.1. Read the text and translate it.

AUTOMATION. COMPUTER INTEGRATED MANUFACTURING

1. Modern factory technologies, especially those based on computers, are changing the nature of work in manufacturing enterprises.

What will be the effects on work in factories of the future of such developments as robotics, automatic material transfer systems, CAD/CAM integration, and the like?

2. … (A) Automation is being used to eliminate hazardous tasks for humans, such as spray painting or work in hot environments… (B). However, these are not the only activities which can be, and are being automated. Many factory jobs are not excessively hazardous, but they are routine and repetitive. As such, they can be taken over ultimately by programmed machines. The demand for human workers in these areas will decrease, as jobs are created in equipment installation, programming monitoring and maintenance. Different skills for specific fu­ture jobs will be required, and that implies a major need for education and training programs.

3. The major trend today is toward total integration of manu­facturing using computer technology…(C).

Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) has opened the door to improved productivity, quality, and profitability for manufacturing facilities of all sizes… (D). At the same time, however, managing the integration of rapidly changing new technologies while continuously modernizing a manufacturing organization and its facilities is the single greatest challenge facing manufacturers today.

4. CIM is perhaps the ultimate expression of manufacturing science. Its intent is to move industry through a three — step process designed to maximize efficiency — to help it evolve from a sluggish and cumbersome labor-sensitive enterprise to a responsive information system whose output just happens to be hard goods.

The first step involves the creation of islands of automa­tion — specialized workstations that perform, with or wit­hout human assistance, some well-defined manufacturing task. The hardware involved may be anything from a nu­merically controlled milling machine to a highly articulated robot. The control systems are generally, local and dedicated to their own islands… (E).

The second step is networking these islands into a closed loop system. This is essential if the manufacturing process is to escape its paper quagmire; a number of CIM system in­tegrators, unallied with traditional control vendors, are aris­ing to bridge the various gaps.

The third step is the complete integration of factory auto­mation systems with corporate data processing (DP) and ma­nagement information computers — effectively uniting an organization (which may be spread around the globe) into a single, highly responsive closed loop production machine.

II. Vocabulary.

Ex.1. Make up the collocations.

1. specialized 2. improved 3. well-defined 4. programmed 5. closed

1. loop 2. machines 3. productivity 4. workstation 5. task

Ex.2. Fill in the gaps with the appropriate word-combination from ex.1.

1. Modern means of automation make it possible to link in … the whole technological chain: machine designing, equipment and rigging, control of a technological process, control of the whole enterprise.

2. But sophisticated programming methods using computer graphics and menus ease … greatly.

3. The main reasons for designing and implementing FMS include first …, which means a greater output and lower unit cost on a smaller floor space.

4. Stand-alone processors can be dedicated to a different task or for a particular user and can be called ….

5. The cell has all of the elements of a full FMS, including two or three …, material handling, pallet changing, host computer and all of the management information communication capability.