The study of the different methods of production of highly-charged ions is going to become more important in the coming years, because many projects in Europe, in Japan and in USA will require more intense beams, even one order of magnitude above the ones produced by the existing sources. During the workshop PIBHI2000 at INFN-LNS in Catania, the state-of-the-art of some projects concerning the production of intense highly-charged ion beams (pulsed and dc) was presented. The paper will summarize the most interesting results, with particular emphasis on the recent tests carried out at Catania, where currents above 100 eμA were obtained for all charge states of Xenon up to 30+ (above 500 eμA were produced for Xe 20+ ) by operating the superconducting ECR ion source SERSE at a higher plasma density, produced by 28 GHz microwaves.