This volume contains the selected manuscripts of the papers presented at the Second IDMME Conference on "Integrated Design and Manufacturing in Mechanical Engineering," held in Compiegne, France, at the University of Technology of Compiegne, May 27-29, 1998. The purpose of the Conference was to present and discuss topics dealing with the optimization of product design and manufacturing processes with particular attention to (1) the analysis and optimum design of mechanical parts and mechanisms (2) the modeling of forming processes (3) the development of computer aided manufacturing tools (4) the methodological aspects of integrated design and manufacturing in adapted technical and human environments. The initiative of the conference and the organization thereof is mainly due to the efforts of the french PRIMECA group (Pool of Computer ResoUfces for Mechanics). The international Institution for Production Engineering Research (C.I.R.P.) was helpful to attract international participants. The conference brought together three hundred and twenty worldwide participants.

The objectives of industrial management are: - Implementation of the policy adopted by the owners or the board of directors - Optimum return on investment - Efficient utilization of Men, Machine and Money. In other words, industry must make profit. Manufacturing represents only one aspect of the activities of industrial management. Present-day manufacturing methodology does not consider making profit as their primary objective. The manufacturing process requires the knowledge of many disciplines, such as design, process planning, costing, marketing, sales, customer relations, costing, purchasing, bookkeeping, inventory control, material handling, shipping, and so on. Each discipline considers the problem at hand from a different angle. For example, in the case of the introduction of a new product: - Marketing will evaluate its attractiveness to the customers -The product designer will evaluate methods of achieving product functions - The process planner will evaluate the required resources - Finance will evaluate the required investment - Manpower will consider the work force demands -The manufacturing engineer will consider floor space and material handling - Purchasing and shipping will consider how to store the product x Preface Each discipline optimizes its task to the best of its ability. Each manufacturing discipline has its own objectives and criteria of optimization according to its function. For example: the designer main objective is meeting product specifications; the process planner's main objective is that the items will meet drawing specifications; the production planner's main objectives are meeting the due date, and minimizing work-in-process.

With a wealth of updated material, rewritten chapters and additional case studies, this fourth edition of a hugely important work gives a broad and up-to-date overview of the concepts underlying APS. Special emphasis is given to modeling supply chains and implementing APS successfully in industrial contexts. What 's more, readers understanding is enhanced by several case studies covering a wide range of industrial sectors. What makes this book so crucial is that Supply Chain Management, Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP), and Advanced Planning Systems (APS) are concepts that must be mastered in order to organize and optimize the flow of goods, materials, information and funds. Here, leading experts provide insights into the concepts underlying APS.

Signs are critically important in all forms of activity, including business, because they establish what it is to be human. Without signs we could not think, we could not communicate what we think and we could not ensure that we collaborate together in our work, home and leisure. The aim of this book is to explain how and why they are significant.

Distributed decision making (DDM) has become of increasing importance in quantitative decision analysis. In applications like supply chain management, service operations, or managerial accounting, DDM has led to a paradigm shift. The book provides a unified approach to such seemingly diverse fields as multi-level stochastic programming, hierarchical production planning, principal agent theory, negotiations or contract theory. Different settings like multi-level one-person decision problems, multi-person antagonistic planning, and leadership situations are covered. Numerous examples and real-life planning cases illustrate the concepts. The new edition has been considerably expanded by additional chapters on supply chain management, service operations and multi-agent systems.

International Applications of Productivity and Efficiency Analysis features a complete range of techniques utilized in frontier analysis, including extensions of existing techniques and the development of new techniques. Another feature is that most of the contributions use panel data in a variety of approaches. Finally, the range of empirical applications is at least as great as the range of techniques, and many of the applications are of considerable policy relevance.

This book readdresses fundamental issues in knowledge management, leading to a new area of study: knowledge processes. McInerney's and Day's superb authors from various disciplines offer new and exciting views on knowledge acquisition, generation, sharing and management in a post-industrial environment. Their contributions discuss problems of knowledge acquisition, handling, and learning from a variety of perspectives.

In today's retail environment, characterized by product proliferation, price competition, expectations of service quality, and advances in technology, many organizations are struggling to maintain profitability. Rigorous analytical methods have emerged as the most promising solution to many of these complex problems. Indeed, the retail industry has emerged as a fascinating choice for researchers in the field of supply chain management.

In Retail Supply Chain Management, leading researchers provide a detailed review of cutting-edge methodologies that address the complex array of these problems. A critical resource for researchers and practitioners in the field of retailing, chapters in this book focus on three key areas: (1) empirical studies of retail supply chain practices, (2) assortment and inventory planning, and (3) integrating price optimization into retail supply chain decisions.

Over the past decade, the transport industry has become an increasingly popular scapegoat for polluting the environment with emissions and noise. Therefore, additional transport infrastructure investments, especially in road transport, are becoming more and more contentious. Conversely, the advocates of free trade stress the importance of transport to enhance economic growth and subsequently the standards of living. Thus, political decision makers and business people alike are facing the challenge of reconciling these conflicting ideas. Though being one of the most prominent topics in public discussion, hard facts are still rare.

In order to analyze the question from a different perspective, this book sets out to combine different approaches from economics as well as business administration to stimulate scientific discourse and to support decision-makers in their efforts to ameliorate the situation.

The first part of this book contributes to the empirics of the relationship between transport and economic growth, or more specifically, whether "decoupling" of transport and economic growth appears possible. For this purpose previously unavailable regional data for Italy and Germany were collected and analyzed. The results indicate that transport makes an important contribution to economic growth.

Therefore, the second part of this book goes into more detail. Given the economic importance of transport and the resistance against the expansion of the transport infrastructure, it is essential to make efficient use of the already existing transportation network. For this purpose the author investigates which characteristics of transport are perceived as most important by decision makers, applying an adaptive conjoint analysis. The results show that transport quality in terms of timeliness, reliability, etc. seems to be at least as important as the monetary transport costs.

The word cleaning covers a wide range of activities from good housekeeping and janitorial duties to clinical process cleaning applications that form part of our everyday lives, most people are not aware of their existence, and yet without them, many of the services and products we take for granted would not be available. Most chapters include case studies of various cleaning problems together with the solutions offered. Emphasis is placed on the practical aspects of designing, manufacturing and operating cleaning equipment, this includes a detailed examination of traditional cleaning methods, and considers a number of lessor known techniques that have been developed over recent years together with a glimpse of the future trends in the industry In addition to the actual cleaning techniques, the book examines the effect, of increasing international health, safety, training, and environmental legislation together with regulations that control cleaning standards in the pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, food and drinks manufacturing industries. In this respect, the book is not intended to be a definitive reference book. Legislation and regulations are continually being upgraded, particularly those relating to European Directives. No apologies are given for the fact that the reader will be continually reminded of the need to obtain up to date copies of the various documents referred to, and to secure expert advice on those issues that are crucial in terms of health, safety and hazardous conditions. To assist the reader, useful information sources are listed in the reference section following each chapter. jkljk

What does "excellent manufacturing management" mean? Management texts to date have emphasized that it is, above methods such as SPC or TQM, a matter of "intangibles" and "culture." This book takes the myth out of management excellence; it can be learned and practiced. First, manage the three core processes, strategy deployment, product and process development, and the supply chain. And secondly, pay attention to the dimension of management quality, direction setting, integration and delegation, communication, participation, measurement, and employee development. This book explains management quality and demonstrates how it is implemented, with ten plant tours through world-class factories from different industries.

Purchasing .Fabrication Assembly Distribution Figure 1.1: Multi-Level Manufacturing System for Make-to-Order Products specific resources of a type, i.e., a certain machine or a single worker, the determination of the sequence operations are processed on a ma chine, and the assignment of start and finish times to operations. We will modify this framework to be specifically suited for multi level make-to-order manufacturing systems. We assume that the facil ity design issue is settled, i.e., the location and the layout of the facility as well as the capacity ofthe three main resource types of the company are determined. These resource types are the engineering department, the fabrication department, and the assembly department. The engineering department is concerned with the construction of new products as well as the modification and customization of ex isting products. This entails the generation of engineering documents such as blue prints for manufacturing. The capacity of the engineering department is determined by the the count and qualification of engi neers and by the availability of construction devices such as computer aided design (CAD) systems etc."

Knowledge is the great fifth production factor in our economy, besides capital, labour, land, and entrepreneurship. Perhaps it is the most precious of the five factors, because it takes so much effort and money to keep it well-nourished. Perhaps it is the most strategic of the five factors, because we depend on it to develop business, the economy, and the world at large in a balanced and sustainable direction. Knowledge is certainly one of the least understood factors and one of the hardest to grasp. This book concerns the largest pool of knowledge, which is professional knowledge. This form of knowledge, albeit being very close to business practice, is nonetheless least understood of all. Economists have tried to grasp the knowledge factor, measuring and assessing it in terms of the pools of R&D-expenditures, patented innovations, licences, and other forms of knowledge that can be documented. The pool of professional knowledge is not among these, because it is tacit. It can only exist in our head; it is intrinsically tied to people --the professionals. Professional knowledge is the articulation of scientific and documented knowledge, and the individual experience and dexterity of individuals. It is for this reason that it is so hard to grasp; while for this very same reason, it is so close to the life of business, to the shopfloor of our advanced economies.

The world of logistics has considerably changed due to globalization, modern information technology, and especially increasing ecological awareness. Large Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems are developing to global logistic networks. This book reflects major trends of the recent decade in SCM and, additionally, presents ideas and visions for logistic networks of the 21st century. Among the various aspects of SCM, emphasis is placed on reverse logistics: closing the loop of a supply chain by integrating waste materials into logistic management decisions.

This book deals with the contribution of a systems approach to a range of disciplines from philosophy and biology to social theory and management. It weaves together material from some of the pre-eminent thinkers of the day. In doing so it creates a coherent path from fundamental work on philosophical issues of ontology and epistemology through specific domains of knowledge about the nature of information and meaning, human communication, and social intervention.

This edited volume contains 16 research articles. It presents recent and pressing issues in stochastic processes, control theory, differential games, optimization, and their applications in finance, manufacturing, queueing networks, and climate control. One of the salient features is that the book is highly multi-disciplinary. The book is dedicated to Professor Suresh Sethi on the occasion of his 60th birthday, in view of his distinguished career.

Markov chains are a particularly powerful and widely used tool for analyzing a variety of stochastic (probabilistic) systems over time. This monograph will present a series of Markov models, starting from the basic models and then building up to higher-order models. Included in the higher-order discussions are multivariate models, higher-order multivariate models, and higher-order hidden models. In each case, the focus is on the important kinds of applications that can be made with the class of models being considered in the current chapter. Special attention is given to numerical algorithms that can efficiently solve the models.

Therefore, Markov Chains: Models, Algorithms and Applications outlines recent developments of Markov chain models for modeling queueing sequences, Internet, re-manufacturing systems, reverse logistics, inventory systems, bio-informatics, DNA sequences, genetic networks, data mining, and many other practical systems.

This book provides successful implementations of metaheuristic methods for neural network training. It is the first book to achieve this objective. Moreover, the basic principles and fundamental ideas given in the book will allow the readers to create successful training methods on their own. Overall, the book's aim is to provide a broad coverage of the concepts, methods, and tools of the important area of ANNs within the realm of continuous optimization.

In a unified and carefully developed presentation, this book systematically examines recent developments in VRP. The book focuses on a portfolio of significant technical advances that have evolved over the past few years for modeling and solving vehicle routing problems and VRP variations. Reflecting the most recent scholarship, this book is written by one of the top research scholars in Vehicle Routing and is one of the most important books in VRP to be published in recent times.

This textbook provides a comprehensive modeling, reformulation and optimization approach for solving production planning and supply chain planning problems, covering topics from a basic introduction to planning systems, mixed integer programming (MIP) models and algorithms through the advanced description of mathematical results in polyhedral combinatorics required to solve these problems.

Based on twenty years worth of research in which the authors have played a significant role, the book addresses real life industrial production planning problems (involving complex production structures with multiple production stages) using MIP modeling and reformulation approach.

The book provides an introduction to MIP modeling and to planning systems, a unique collection of reformulation results, and an easy to use problem-solving library. This approach is demonstrated through a series of real life case studies, exercises and detailed illustrations.

Review by Jakub Marecek (Computer Journal) The emphasis put on mixed integer rounding and mixing sets, heuristics in-built in general purpose integer programming solvers, as well as on decompositions and heuristics using integer programming should be praised... There is no doubt that this volume offers the present best introduction to integer programming formulations of lotsizing problems, encountered in production planning. (2007)

Thesubjectofthisbookisthenested partitions method(NP),arelativelynew optimization method that has been found to be very e?ective solving discrete optimization problems. Such discrete problems are common in many practical applications and the NP method is thus useful in diverse application areas. It can be applied to both operational and planning problems and has been demonstrated to e?ectively solve complex problems in both manufacturing and service industries. To illustrate its broad applicability and e?ectiveness, in this book we will show how the NP method has been successful in solving complex problems in planning and scheduling, logistics and transportation, supply chain design, data mining, and health care. All of these diverse app- cationshaveonecharacteristicincommon:theyallleadtocomplexlarge-scale discreteoptimizationproblemsthatareintractableusingtraditionaloptimi- tion methods. 1.1 Large-Scale Optimization IndevelopingtheNPmethodwewillconsideroptimization problemsthatcan be stated mathematically in the following generic form: minf(x), (1.1) x?X where the solution space or feasible region X is either a discrete or bounded ? set of feasible solutions. We denote a solution to this problem x and the ? ? objective function value f = f (x ).

This book focuses on real time management of distribution systems, integrating the latest results in system design, algorithm development and system implementation to capture the state-of-the art research and application trends. The book important topics such as goods dispatching, couriers, rescue and repair services, taxi cab services, and more. The book includes real-life case studies that describe the solution to actual distribution problems by combining systemic and algorithmic approaches.

Lean Manufacturing has proved to be one of the most successful and most powerful production business systems over the last decades. Its application enabled many companies to make a big leap towards better utilization of resources and thus provide better service to the customers through faster response, higher quality and lowered costs. Lean is often described as "eyes for flow and eyes for muda" philosophy. It simply means that value is created only when all the resources flow through the system. If the flow is stopped no value but only costs and time are added, which is muda (Jap. waste). Since the philosophy was born at the Toyota many solutions were tailored for the high volume environment. But in turbulent, fast-changing market environment and progressing globalization, customers tend to require more customization, lower volumes and higher variety at much less cost and of better quality. This calls for adaptation of existing lean techniques and exploration of the new waste-free solutions that go far beyond manufacturing. This book brings together the opinions of a number of leading academics and researchers from around the world responding to those emerging needs. They tried to find answer to the question how to move forward from "Spaghetti World" of supply, production, distribution, sales, administration, product development, logistics, accounting, etc. Through individual chapters in this book authors present their views, approaches, concepts and developed tools. The reader will learn the key issues currently being addressed in production management research and practice throughout the world.

Most manufacturing systems are large, complex, and operate in an environment of uncertainty. It is common practice to manage such systems in a hierarchical fashion. This book articulates a new theory that shows that hierarchical decision making can in fact lead to a near optimization of system goals. The material in the book cuts across disciplines. It will appeal to graduate students and researchers in applied mathematics, operations management, operations research, and system and control theory.

In today's global economy, operations strategy in supply chains must assume an ever-expanding and strategic role of risks. These operational and strategic facets entail a brand new set of operational problems and risks that have not always been understood or managed very well. This book provides the means to understand, to model and to analyze these outstanding issues and problems that are the essential elements in managing supply chains today.