Abstract: Facing the fierce global market competition, process manufacturing systems (companies) must put much emphasis on both technologies and management issues, in order to optimally improve their overall performance. It is proposed that the competitive edge of process companies can only be sharpened by integrating human, organization, strategy, management, process optimization, information and technology factors. Referring to the status of Chinese petrochemical companies, this paper first surveys the problems confronting process manufacturing systems and discusses relevant development tendencies. Appropriate management paradigms are required to support flexible organization structures in process companies and to enhance employee innovation and commitments. Subsequently, an architecture consisting of function, process, organization, resource and product views is proposed to address process manufacturing systems in a unified way. Finally, technologies enable process integration and optimization are studied on basis of multi -agent based models.

Key words: process system, management paradigm, architecture, information integration, process optimization