Process Control Performance Assessment is a practical guide to the application of control benchmarking to real, complex, industrial processes. It presents commercial solutions as well as current and future techniques still under development and contains real full-scale-implementation industrial case studies from the oil and gas, power and chemical industries providing a hierarchical perspective on benchmarks. The effect of benchmarking and control tuning on process performance and revenue optimisation is demonstrated.

The most frequently occurring practical issues associated with implementing benchmarking algorithms in industrial processes are discussed in detailed and concise terms and guidelines given for avoiding common problems. The impact of problems like valve stiction and plant-wide disturbances on process performance is reviewed and methods for diagnosing causative fault conditions suggested.

The benefit of non-intrusive and intrusive benchmarking techniques for optimising control systems using performance assessment and diagnostic tools is the potential to enhance company operational economics through increased throughput and better product quality. The book is appropriate for industrial and academic control and process engineers who wish to learn about methods of benchmarking through directed study or self study.

BASYS conferences were initially organized to promote the development of balanced automation systems. The first BASYS conference was successfully launched in Victoria, Brazil, in 1995. BASYS'06 is the 7th edition in this series. This book comprises three invited keynote papers and forty-nine regular papers accepted for presentation at the conference. All together, these papers will make significant contributions to the literature of Intelligent Technology for Balanced Manufacturing Systems.

Manufacturing a product is not difficult, the difficulty consists in manufacturing a product of high quality, at a low cost and rapidly. Drastic technological advances are changing global markets very rapidly. In such conditions the ability to compete successfully must be based on innovative ideas and new products which has to be of high quality yet low in price. One way to achieve these objecti ves would be through massive investments in research of computer based technology and by applying the approaches presented in this book. The First International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing Systems and Technology AMST87 was held in Opatija (Croatia) in October 1987. The Second International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing Systems and Technology AMSV90 was held in Trento (Italy) in lune 1990. The Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Conferences on Advanced Manufacturing Systems and Technology were all held in Udine (Italy) as follows: AMST93 in April 1993, AMST96 in September 1996, AMST99 in June 1999 and AMST02 in June 2002.

In recent years the situation of production enterprises has been aggravated by the change from a vendors' market to a buyers' market, the globaHsation of competition, a severe market segmentation and rapid progress in product and process technologies. Beside cost and quality, time has taken on an increasingly important role, forcing enterprises to become ever more dynamic and versatile. Therefore, in all areas of production management, novel, effective concepts, procedures and tools have been developed in order to meet these new requirements. But beyond these more technical, organisational and information technology related aspects there is certainly another one which has to be considered more closely than ever before, namely that of human resources. Is not group technology also related to group work? Do partners in a global network only operate according to predefined process schemes with no personal contact? Are the mental process models of the programmers of ERP-systems the same as those of the users? What is the impact of human behaviour and what consequences are to be expected if organisational and individual objectives are separated? And finally, how do necessary technological changes affect the workforce and the individual needs and wishes of the employees.

Industries and particularly the manufacturing sector have been facing difficult challenges in a context of socio-economic turbulence characterized by complexity as well as the speed of change in causal interconnections in the socio-economic environment. In order to respond to these challenges companies are forced to seek new technological and organizational solutions.

In this context two main characteristics emerge as key properties of a modern automation system - agility and distribution. Agility because systems need not only to be flexible in order to adjust to a number of a-priori defined scenarios, but rather must cope with unpredictability. Distribution in the sense that automation and business processes are becoming distributed and supported by collaborative networks.

Emerging Solutions for Future Manufacturing Systems includes the papers selected for the BASYS'04 conference, which was held in Vienna, Austria in September 2004 and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).

Presents a methodology developed by DaimlerChrysler.

Illustrates the methodology through detailed case studies.

Owing to the development and rapid spread of communication technologies including the Internet, the world is indeed turning into a global village. The rate of introduction of new products and technologies is steadily rising. At the same time, pressures to reduce time-to-market are mounting. Only companies that are able to realize products rapidly are able to survive today.
From a technological viewpoint, rapid product realization involves rapid design, rapid prototyping, and rapid tooling. Fortunately, a class of technologies, also collectively called rapid prototyping (RP) technologies, has emerged in the last two decades or so to meet these requirements. Early technologies merely aimed to produce single part look-alikes. However, intense R&D efforts are taking place around the world to go beyond mere look alike' single part prototyping, into functional, multi-part assemblies.
RP technologies are different from other modern manufacturing technologies in many ways. In RP, material is usually added incrementally in a layered manner and, occasionally, subtracted. Some technologies depend upon layers of resin cured under the influence of one or more CNC controlled laser beams. Others use lasers to selectively sinter layers of powdered metal. There are also RP technologies that do not use lasers at all. Indeed, RP is turning out to be a potent arena for technological creativity.
This book provides an updated overview of RP technologies at a level of detail that university engineering students taking courses on RP as well R&D and operating professionals from industry interested in RP are likely to find attractive. While the emphasis is on laser-based technologies, other processesare also discussed. With respect to each important RP process, the part/assembly modeling techniques, the materials used, process itself, advantages and disadvantages, accuracy and finish issues as well as application potential are discussed.

The last two decades have witnessed important shifts in customers' behaviour. Companies now need to integrate customers in their strategies and manufacturers have to propose a large variety of products to meet the market's demand. Increasing the range of PVs attracts and retains customers, yet it dramatically augments the cost and complexity of the manufacturing systems. As many decisions taken at the design stage of the product are decisive for its entire life, it is crucial to integrate the process and the assembly system when designing the product.

Integrated Design of a Product Family and Its Assembly System presents an integrated approach for the design of a product family and its assembly system, whose main principles consider the product family as a fictitious unique product for which the assembly system is to be devised. It imposes assembly and operation constraints as late as possible in the design process to get liberties in the system design, and adapts the product family at each design stage to integrate the new constraints related to the successive design choices.
Integrated Design of a Product Family and Its Assembly System is an important, must-have book for researchers and Ph.D. students in Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, Mechanical Engineering, and Manufacturing, as well as practitioners in the Design, Planning and Production departments in the manufacturing industry. Integrated Design of a Product Family and Its Assembly System is also suitable for use as a textbook in courses such as Computer-Aided Design, Concurrent Engineering, Design for Assembly, Process Planning, and Integrated Design.

Low-volume high-variety products like personalized cars or customized engines will be the key issues for manufacturing in the 21st century. The necessary control technology is based on the concept of holons, which are the units of production and behave as autonomous and cooperative agents, providing flexibility, adaptability, agility, and dynamic reconfigurability. This book presents the latest research results in agent-based manufacturing as carried out by researchers in academia and industry within the international "Holonic Manufacturing Systems" project. As this project was driven by industry, the results presented here are of vital interest not just to researchers in agent technologies or distributed artificial intelligence, but also to engineers and professionals in industry who have to respond to rapid changes and new demands in production.

This book deals with Web applications in product design and manufacture, thus filling an information gap in digital manufacturing in the Internet era. It helps both developers and users to appreciate the potentials, as well as difficulties, in developing and adopting Web applications. The objective is to equip potential users and practitioners of Web applications with a better appreciation of the technology. In addition, Web application developers and new researchers in this field will gain a clearer understanding of the selection of system architecture and design, development and implementation techniques, and deployment strategies. The book is divided into two main parts. The first part gives an overview of Web and Internet and the second explains eight typical Web applications.

The Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture Conference series is now in its tenth year and has become a well-established, application-oriented meeting recognised by several UK Engineering Institutions and the International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computing. The main theme of the conference again relates to the integration of evolutionary and adaptive computing technologies with design and manufacturing processes whilst also taking into account complementary advanced computing technologies. Evolutionary and adaptive computing techniques continue to increase their penetration of industrial and commercial practice as their powerful search, exploration and optimisation capabilities become ever more apparent. The last two years have seen a very significant increase in the development of commercial software tools utilising adaptive computing technologies and the emergence of related commercial research and consultancy organisations supporting the introduction of best practice in terms of industrial utilisation. Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture V is comprised of selected papers that cover a diverse set of industrial application areas including: engineering design and design environments, manufacturing process design, scheduling and control, electronic circuit design, fault detection. Various aspects of search and optimisation such as multi-objective and constrained optimisation are also investigated in the context of integration with industrial processes. In addition to evolutionary computing techniques, both neural-net and agent-based technologies play a role in a number of contributions. This collection of papers will be of particular interest to both industrial researchers and practitioners in addition to the academic research communities of engineering, operational research and computer science.

This volume contains case studies, theoretical papers and project development reports on one of the greatest challenges facing the new digital enterprises: the life cycle approach to management and production. Main issues discussed in the book include CAD/CAM/CIM/CAE, intelligent manufacturing, and control and robotics applications.

Applications of Soft Computing have recently increased and methodological development has been strong. The book is a collection of new interesting industrial applications introduced by several research groups and industrial partners. It describes the principles and results of industrial applications of Soft Computing methods and introduces new possibilities to gain technical and economic benefits by using this methodology. The book shows how fuzzy logic and neural networks have been used in the Finnish paper and metallurgical industries putting emphasis on processes, applications and technical and economic results.

The most powerful computers in the world are not only used for scientific research, defence, and business, but also in game playing. Computer games are a multi-billion dollar industry. Recent advances in computational intelligence paradigms have generated tremendous interest among researchers in the theory and implementation of games. Game theory is a branch of operational research dealing with decision theory in a competitive situation. Game theory involves the mathematical calculations and heuristics to optimize the efficient lines of play. This book presents a sample of the most recent research on the application of computational intelligence techniques in games. This book contains 7 chapters. The first chapter, by Chen, Fanelli, Castellano, and Jain, is an introduction to computational intelligence paradigms. It presents the basics of the main constituents of compu tational intelligence paradigms including knowledge representation, probability-based approaches, fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and rough sets. In the second chapter, Chellapilla and Fogel present the evolution of a neural network to play checkers without human expertise. This chapter focuses on the use of a population of neural networks, where each network serves as an evaluation function to describe the quality of the current board position. After only a little more than 800 generations, the evolutionary process has generated a neural network that can play checkers at the expert level as designated by the u.s. Chess Federation rating system. The program developed by the authors has also competed well against commercially available software."

Optimal Shape Design is concerned with the optimization of some performance criterion dependent (besides the constraints of the problem) on the "shape" of some region. The main topics covered are: the optimal design of a geometrical object, for instance a wing, moving in a fluid; the optimal shape of a region (a harbor), given suitable constraints on the size of the entrance to the harbor, subject to incoming waves; the optimal design of some electrical device subject to constraints on the performance. The aim is to show that Optimal Shape Design, besides its interesting industrial applications, possesses nontrivial mathematical aspects. The main theoretical tools developed here are the homogenization method and domain variations in PDE. The style is mathematically rigorous, but specifically oriented towards applications, and it is intended for both pure and applied mathematicians. The reader is required to know classical PDE theory and basic functional analysis.

The world of artificial systems is reaching hitherto undreamed-of levels of complexity. Surface traffic, electricity distribution, mobile communications, etc., demonstrate that problems are arising that are beyond classical scientific or engineering knowledge. In order that our ability to control such systems should not be hindered by lack of comprehension, there is an on-going effort to understand them.This book is an example of the types of approach that European researchers are using to tackle problems derived from systems' complexity. It has grown out of activities in the Control of Complex Systems (COSY) research program the goals of which are to promote multi-disciplinary activity leading to a deeper understanding and further development of control technologies for complex systems and if possible, to develop the theory underlying such systems. The material in this book represents a selection of the results of the COSY program and is organised as a collection of essays of varying nature: surveys of essential areas, discussion of specific problems, case studies, and benchmark problems.Topics covered include:Modelling complex physical systems;Passivity-based control of non-linear systems;Aspects of fault identification and fault tolerance;Control design;Learning control;Satellite attitude control.Complex systems appear in many different fields and for this reason this book should be of interest to scientists, researchers and industrial engineers with a broad spectrum of experience.

MATLAB , a software package developed by Math Works, Inc. is powerful, versatile and interactive software for scientific and technical computations including simulations. Specialised toolboxes provided with several built-in functions are a special feature of MATLAB .

This book titled System Design through MATLAB Control Toolbox and SIMULINK aims at getting the reader started with computations and simulations in system engineering quickly and easily and then proceeds to build concepts for advanced computations and simulations that includes the control and compensation of systems. Simulation through SIMULINK has also been described to allow the reader to get the feel of the real world situation.

This book is appropriate for undergraduate students undergoing final semester of their project work, postgraduate students who have MATLAB integrated in their course or wish to take up simulation problem in the area of system engineering for their dissertation work and research scholars for whom MATLAB along with toolboxes and SIMULINK is an indispensable tool for simulation.

To download interactive simulations of various systems (523Kb) described in the book, go to http//www.springer.co.uk/matlab.htm

This monograph is concerned with the development and implementation of nonlinear mathematical techniques for feedback control and shape design of robot manipulators whose links have considerable structural flexibility. Several nonlinear control and observation techniques are studied and implemented by simulations and experiments in a laboratory setup. These techniques include integral manifolds in singular perturbation theory, nonlinear input-output decoupling, nonlinear observers and sliding control.
The study of dynamic properties and control techniques for flexible-link manipulators can also be a framework for designing the mechanical shape and material of these systems such that improved properties can be achieved in order to facilitate the control problem. Therefore, structural shape optimization is considered as a means of improving the dynamic behaviour of flexible-link manipulators.

The present edited volume is of special importance, and for various reasons. First of all, it is one of the most comprehensive and multifaceted coverage of broadly per ceived fuzzy control in the literature. The editors have succeeded to collect papers from leading scholars and researchers on various subjects related to the topic of the volume. What is relevant and original is that - as opposed to so many volumes on fuzzy control published by virtually all major publishing houses that are strongly technically oriented and covering a narrow spectrum of issues relevant to fuzzy con trol itself - the editors have adopted a more general and far sighted approach. Basically, the perspective assumed in the volume is that though fuzzy control has reached such a level of maturity and implementability that it has become a part of in dustrial practice, science and academic research still have a relevant role to play in this area. One should however take into account that by their very nature, the role of science and academic research is very peculiar and going beyond straightforward ap plications, ad hoc solutions, "quick and dirty" tools and techniques, etc. that are usu ally effective and efficient for solving practical problems. This does not mean that as pects of practical implementations should not be accounted for by scholars and re searchers."

This collection of selected papers from the Fourth International Conference on Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture (ACDM0) represents a cross-section of the state-of-the art relating to the integration of advanced stochastic search, exploration and optimisation techniques with complex problem areas relating to various aspects of design and manufacturing processes. The Conference, held in the Sherwell Conference Centre at the University of Plymouth, Devon, UK in April, 2000, is a well-established biennial event supported by several UK Engineering Institutions and recognised by the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation as a mainstream event. The conference continues to attract an international audience of leading researchers and practitioners in the field. Aerospace, mechanical, thermal and structural design are among the subjects treated. In terms of manufacturing processes, cell formation, facility design, system control and robotics are addressed. In most cases, results from their application to or integration with real-world industrial problems are very much in evidence and conclusions relating to the overall utility of the various techniques across a diverse spectrum of problem areas are available. Evolutionary computing research and its application provides the mainstay in the great majority of papers. In the tradition of the ACDM series, papers utilising neural computing technologies and related computational intelligence techniques within the design/manufacture environments have also been included. The collection further illustrates the increasing uptake of these technologies in terms of academic research, academic and industrial collaboration andindustrial practice. It is apparent that application strategies are becoming increasingly sophisticated as the powerful data processing capabilities of the technologies become more apparent and their increasing potential leads to integration with more complex problem areas so the book will be of particular interest to both design and computer science research communities in addition to those industrial organisations that are either already including these technologies in day-to-day working practice or that wish to familiarise themselves with the potential utility of their application further.

Pneumatic, hydraulic and allied instrumentation schemes have given way to electronic schemes in recent years thanks to the rapid strides in electronics and allied areas. Principles, design and applications of such state-of-the-art instrumentation schemes form the subject matter of this book. Through representative examples, the basic building blocks of instrumentation schemes are identified and each of these building blocks discussed in terms of its design and interface characteristics. The common generic schemes synthesized with such building blocks are dealt with subsequently. This forms the scope of Part I. The focus in Part II is on application. Displacement and allied instrumentation, force and allied instrumentation and process instrumentation in terms of temperature, flow, pressure level and other common process variables are dealt with separately and exhaustively. Despite the diversity in the sensor principles and characteristics and the variety in the applications and their environments, it is possible judiciously to carve out broad areas of application for each type of sensor and the instrumentation built around it. The last chapter categorises instrumentation schemes according to their different levels of complexity. Specific practical examples - especially at involved complexity levels - are discussed in detail.

At first glance, a book on "Design by Composition for Rapid Prototyping" may seem out of place in a series on Robotics. However, this work has a couple of strong connections to the field of robotics and the robotics community, and I am delighted to introduce it to the series. The first connection is the motivation behind Binnard's work. Michael Binnard came to Stanford after having done his Masters thesis at the M.LT. Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he designed and built small walking robots, such as Boadicea (http: //www.ai.mit.eduJprojects/boadicea/).At M.LT. he observed first-hand how difficult it is to align, connect and support standard actuators, sensors, and processors in small mobile robots. Figure lea) below shows how complicated it is just to connect a simple motor to one link of a robot leg using conventional methods. Surely there had to be a better way Shape deposition manufacturing, an emerging rapid prototyping process, offered a possible solution. Actuators, sensors, processors and other components could be embedded directly into almost arbitrary three-dimensional shapes, without any of the fasteners and couplings that complicate the design in Figure lea). The process makes it possible to construct integrated robotic mechanisms, such as the example shown in Figure 1 (b) and the additional examples found in Chapters 7 and 8 of this monograph.

Modern computer-based control systems are able to collect a large amount of information, display it to operators and store it in databases but the interpretation of the data and the subsequent decision making relies mainly on operators with little computer support. This book introduces developments in automatic analysis and interpretation of process-operational data both in real-time and over the operational history, and describes new concepts and methodologies for developing intelligent, state space-based systems for process monitoring, control and diagnosis. The book brings together new methods and algorithms from process monitoring and control, data mining and knowledge discovery, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, and causal relationship discovery, as well as signal processing. It also provides a framework for integrating plant operators and supervisors into the design of process monitoring and control systems.

Applications of communication networks lead to radical changes in human life. Fieldbus technology is part of this development acting in close connection to systems control and in critical domains. Equipped with sensitive sensors, fieldbus technology becomes the backbone of many processes of our daily life. In automation technology, fieldbus systems are essential parts of modern applications. In airplanes and in near future also in automobiles, mechanical control is replaced by "x by wirea systems based on fieldbusses, a technique more efficient and flexible, but also cheaper. Moreover, fieldbus technology, used in factories, hospitals, laboratories for the collection of numerous data, enables a more efficient and reliable operation of these complex environments. This book is a collection of articles submitted to the fieldbus conference FeT'99 in Magdeburg, Germany. The articles were reviewed by an international program committee which decided to include some high quality articles not presented at the conference. The book comprises chapters dealing with important aspects of fieldbus technology and reflecting areas of main activity in science and industry: real-time aspects, networking, management, OPC, system aspects, realization, protocol specifications (supplements to introduced fieldbus systems), validation, profile development (i. e. specification of application semantics) and research projects. A further chapter reports on the European harmonization project NOAH.

Multiobjective Scheduling by Genetic Algorithms describes methods for developing multiobjective solutions to common production scheduling equations modeling in the literature as flowshops, job shops and open shops. The methodology is metaheuristic, one inspired by how nature has evolved a multitude of coexisting species of living beings on earth. Multiobjective flowshops, job shops and open shops are each highly relevant models in manufacturing, classroom scheduling or automotive assembly, yet for want of sound methods they have remained almost untouched to date. This text shows how methods such as Elitist Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (ENGA) can find a bevy of Pareto optimal solutions for them. Also it accents the value of hybridizing Gas with both solution-generating and solution-improvement methods. It envisions fundamental research into such methods, greatly strengthening the growing reach of metaheuristic methods. This book is therefore intended for students of industrial engineering, operations research, operations management and computer science, as well as practitioners. It may also assist in the development of efficient shop management software tools for schedulers and production planners who face multiple planning and operating objectives as a matter of course.