Recent world-wide political and financial events have intensified the need to renew the competitiveness of the US manufacturing industry. The means for enabling competitiveness include fast response to the market needs for new designs and re-designs, and the ability to manufacture products at the right quality and at competitive costs. To pursue market and technology opportunities effectively, US commercial and defense industries will be relying increasingly on multi-enterprise partnerships [12]. Vertical partnering combines the strengths of multiple firms in product design, manufacture, after sales support and customer service, in order to launch superior products in the global market.

To support effective partnering, new approaches will be needed for integrating the activities of design, planning, and production. Furthermore, it is important to address both the fundamental modeling of design, process planning, and production planning in ways that account for the capabilities of potential manufacturing partners, and the development of optimization procedures to address the underlying decision problems. This paper elaborates on these issues and discusses approaches for addressing them.