KOSEN 한인과학기술자네트워크

CIRP is the world leading organization in production engineering research and is at the forefront of design, optimization, control and management of processes, machines and systems.
The Academy has restricted membership based on demonstrated excellence in research and has some 600 academic and industrial members from 50 industrialized countries.

In the late 1940s it was becoming increasingly clear that the development of new production techniques was being hampered by the lack of appropriate analysis methods. There was evidently an urgent need for fundamental research to be undertaken in this area.
It was realized that, in view of the importance and scale of the problems to be tackled, only international cooperative action would be effective.
A meeting was held to discuss these problems, which was attended by Messrs E. Bickel (Switzerland), D.F. Galloway (UK), P. Nicolau (France) and O. Peters (Belgium). It was decided that efforts should be made to bring together research workers studying the application of scientific methods to production technology.

This initiative led to the foundation of the International Institution for Production Engineering Research (CIRP former English name) in 1951.

Today, CIRP is increasingly turning its attention to the use of computerized methods for manufacturing control. In particular, automation, robotics, interfacing and the computer integrated factory of the future are all subjects which are receiving detailed consideration. Much of CIRP's work is now concerned with applying a systems approach to manufacturing, with the communication requirements of the CIM environment, with the role of people in future manufacturing processes. More and more attention is reserved to problems like sustainable production, environmental impact of new technologies and manufacturing aspects of globalization.

CIRP hosts two regular meetings; one in January focusing on technical discussions and the other in August called 'General Assembly'. January meeting is always in Paris, France and General Assembly holds in various countries. The paper acceptance rate is about 50% and its rate is decreasing as the number of submission is increasing every year while there only the fixed number of spots during the conference. The participants are from all over the world with strong participations from the following countries; Germany, Japan, France, USA, and most of European countries.

CIRP works as membership based organization and one must be the member to participate the conference and non-member needs an invitation to participate in the conference. The total number of members and quota for each country is fixed.

CIRP is well acknowledged premier society and their conference (General Assembly) is very famous due to publication and depth of discussion during the conference. Especially, it produces keynote papers on the most important topics in manufacturing area of the time and those keynote papers has served as textbooks for many researchers, policy makers, and industry.

I am an associate member of the CIRP and can attend this conference. As mentioned above, CIRP sets new manufacturing agenda and conduct in-depth technical discussions. Therefore, it would be very beneficial for Korean manufacturing community to follow up what CIRP is up to.