Distributed Information & Automation Laboratory

About the centre

Companies today can access unprecedented amounts of information about their assets and products anywhere in their supply chains. Objects can be tracked around the world providing data that is transforming supply chain management. Combined with highly flexible and responsive decision support systems, these radical new capabilities are opening up opportunities to provide dynamic services and smart products.

The Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory (DIAL) studies ways in which advanced information systems and automated identification technologies, such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), can be combined with advanced production and asset management systems to create and deploy smart products, flexible, reconfigurable manufacturing operations and innovative services.

DIAL incorporates the Cambridge Auto-ID Lab, which was a founding partner in the Auto-ID Centre project to bring affordable RFID to the consumer-packaged goods industry. DIAL's interests cover all aspects of manufacturing and operations control from automated manufacturing cells to business wide enterprise resource planning and asset management systems.

DIAL's vision is to extend its distinctive expertise at the interface between technical and managerial control of complex industrial systems, and to deploy this expertise at different points in the life-cycle of a product.

DIAL does this by:

• exploiting the key enabling technology of RFID
• integrating automatic identification (Auto-ID) and data capture technologies into existing business systems
• developing improved decision support systems
• developing distributed automated solutions for maufacturing
• applying smart technologies to service and support
• assessing and improving industrial responsiveness and performance
• quantifying the value of improved information for better decision making
• reconfiguring supply networks and production systems

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