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The need of a functional integration in the manufacturing area (Production, Quality, Maintenance), outlooking for a new manufacturing agility, causes the emergence of concerns with reliability, maintenance and security of the manufacturing equiplTlents at the shop-floor. Several models and methodologies, encompassing technical, hUlTllln, social and organisational aspects such as Total Preventive Maintenance (TPM) or Continuous Improvement (Kaizen), are today available to help in implementing new paradigms in this area. In this paper, we briefly relate our experiences in the development of a maintenance ITIIlnagement inforlTllltion system in a shoes manufacturing company, highlighting the socio-organisational context influence on this development. This project was part of the ESPRIT project Real-I-CIM, aimed at providing low cost shop floor advanced management tools, inside an open and distributed architecture.

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This paper describes a integrated set of tools supporting Prototype Development, Test and Integration of Shop-Floor Management Applications, as well as an illustrative case study. IncreasingRequirements advise that rapid prototyping of shop-floor software applications is fostered by the use of powerful modelling tools. The authors describe the use of a combined agent oriented/structured analysis approach to build the software system agent hierarchy and behaviour, which are further modelled as SDL process classes through a powerful Modelling Workbench. The result of this approach was the integration of two off-the-shelf tools, the Teamwork CASE Tool and the Modelling Workbench. This integration allows the SDL executable models to be used as emulated shop-floor applications. These application models, interacting with the prototypes of their user interfaces, as well as with the actual shop-floor simulation and production control models, may then be fully tested by the end-user in close-toreal conditions. KeywordsPrototype development, shop-floor applications, modelling tools, SDL 1.Shop-floor Software Application Prototype Development Agent based analysisSpecial care must taken in the development of manufacturing management applications, specially those running at the shop-floor level, since application unreliability or inadequacy in meeting user requirements usually lead to expensive consequences. Within this context, software development approaches supported by prototyping and simulation may be used to forecast the application behavioue and thus prevent unexpected results. L. M. Camarinha-Matos et al. (eds.), Balanced Automation Systems II

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When the COVID-19 pandemic hits Portugal in early March 2020, medical doctors, engineers and researchers, with the encouragement of the Northern Region Health Administration, teamed up to develop and build, locally and in a short time, a ventilator that might eventually be used in extreme emergency situations in the hospitals of northern Portugal. This letter tells you the story of Pneuma, a low-cost emergency ventilator designed and built under harsh isolation constraints, that gave birth to derivative designs in Brazil and Morocco, has been industrialized with 200 units being produced and is now looking forward to the certification as a medical device that will possibly support a go-to-market launch. Open intellectual property (IP), multidisciplinarity teamwork, fast prototyping and product engineering have shortened to a few months an otherwise quite longer idea-to-product route, clearly demonstrating that when scientific and engineering knowledge hold hands great challenges can be successfully faced.