This workshop was born during the annual meeting of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Special Interest Group for Manufacturing's (AAAI/ SIG-MAN) in August 1995 in Montreal. It was recognized that, although there are a number of researchers in artificial intelligence and manufacturing and a small but growing number of deployed applications in government and industry' researchers and practitioners come from a diverse set of backgrounds and affiliations. We made a goal of contacting a number of government finding organizations with the notion of pulling together researchers and practitioners into one workshop to exchange ideas and to develop, in the context of small discussion groups, ideas for a report which can help to shape the course of research and development in the near future. Over the past decade, artificial intelligence concepts and techniques have been productively applied to diverse aspects of manufacturing decision-making, ranging from product and process development, to production management, to process diagnosis and quality control. It is no longer a question of whether AI technologies will have an impact on manufacturing but one of better understanding and exploiting the broad potential of AI in this domain.