Design frameworks have become an important infrastructure for building complex design systems. Electronic Design Automation Frameworks presents a state-of-the-art review of the latest research results covering this topic; results which are also of value for other design frameworks. The book contains the selected proceedings of the Fourth International Working Conference on Electronic Design Frameworks, organized by the International Federation for Information Processing and held in Gramado, Brazil, in November 1994.

Safety and Risk Modeling presents the latest theories and methods of safety and risk with an emphasis on safety and risk in modeling. It covers applications in several areas including transportations and security risk assessments, as well as applications related to current topics in safety and risk. Safety and Risk Modeling is a valuable resource for understanding the latest developments in both qualitative and quantitative methods of safety and risk analysis and their applications in operating environments. Each chapter has been written by active researchers or experienced practitioners to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to trigger new research challenges in safety and risk. Topics include: safety engineering, system maintenance, safety in design, failure analysis, and risk concept and modelling. Postgraduate students, researchers, and practitioners in many fields of engineering, operations research, management, and statistics will find Safety and Risk Modeling a state-of-the-art survey of reliability and quality in design and practice.

Towards Balanced Automation The concept. Manufacturing industries worldwide are facing tough challenges as a consequence of the globalization of economy and the openness of the markets. Progress of the economic blocks such as the European Union, NAFTA, and MERCOSUR, and the global agreements such as GATT, in addition to their obvious economic and social consequences, provoke strong paradigm shifts in the way that the manufacturing systems are conceived and operate. To increase profitability and reduce the manufacturing costs, there is a recent tendency towards establishing partnership links among the involved industries, usually between big industries and the networks of components' suppliers. To benefit from the advances in technology, similar agreements are being established between industries and universities and research institutes. Such an open tete-cooperation network may be identified as an extended enterprise or a virtual enterprise. In fact, the manufacturing process is no more carried out by a single enterprise, rather each enterprise is just a node that adds some value (a step in the manufacturing chain) to the cooperation network of enterprises. The new trends create new scenarios and technological challenges, especially to the Small and Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) that clearly comprise the overwhelming majority of manufacturing enterprises worldwide. Under the classical scenarios, these SMEs would have had big difficulties to access or benefit from the state of the art technology, due to their limited human, financial, and material resources.

Over the last few decades, there have been dramatic improvements in the understanding and research of environmental design. Numerous methods have been developed to enhance architectural design in order for it to be more energy efficient, sustainable and health enhancing.

This book presents several theories and techniques that can be used to improve how buildings are engineered and designed in order to utilize more sustainable construction methods while promoting the health of the building's occupants.

Contributions to the study of environmental design have come from a diversity of fields including applied mathematics, optimization, computer science, medical research, psychology, management science, architecture, and engineering. The techniques developed in these areas of research can be used to increase building performance, occupant satisfaction, productivity, and well being, and reducing the incidence of health conditions and chronic diseases related to the use of a designed space.

This book provides architectural practitioners, civil engineers as well as other interdisciplinary researchers with the techniques needed to design, implement, and test for sustainability and health promotion in new or existing structures.

Feature-based technology is the key factor towards meeting the increasingly high demands of improving and speeding up the product development process from concept to customer feedback, and is therefore expected to be able to provide for a better approach to integrate the complete product design process chain. Feature Based Product Life-Cycle Modelling is dedicated to exploring the progress towards an integrated solution for the product creation process based on feature technology. Hence, it encompasses significant phases of the product creation process, from conceptual design to recycling, including the following topics: *Life-phases modelling; *Knowledge based engineering; *Multiple-view geometric modelling; *Technological links among assemblies; *Manufacturing process cost estimation; *Manufacturing modelling; *Machining preparation; *Product deterioration prediction; *Product recovery estimation. For each topic, a state of the art, theoretic bases, tentative solutions and illustrative examples are detailed, demonstrating the successful application of feature technology to the modelling of innovative products and the efficient control of their design. The book is a selection of proceedings from the International Conference on Feature Modelling in Advanced Design-for-the-Life-Cycle Systems (FEATS 2001), which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Valenciennes, France in June 2001.

In recent years microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have emerged as a new technology with enormous application potential. MEMS manufacturing techniques are essentially the same as those used in the semiconductor industry, therefore they can be produced in large quantities at low cost. The added benefits of lightweight, miniature size and low energy consumption make MEMS commercialization very attractive. Modeling and simulation is an indispensable tool in the process of studying these new dynamic phenomena, development of new microdevices and improvement of the existing designs. MEMS technology is inherently multidisciplinary since operation of microdevices involves interaction of several energy domains of different physical nature, for example, mechanical, fluidic and electric forces. Dynamic behavior of contact-type electrostatic microactuators, such as a microswitches, is determined by nonlinear fluidic-structural, electrostatic-structural and vibro-impact interactions. The latter is particularly important: Therefore it is crucial to develop accurate computational models for numerical analysis of the aforementioned interactions in order to better understand coupled-field effects, study important system dynamic characteristics and thereby formulate guidelines for the development of more reliable microdevices with enhanced performance, reliability and functionality.

Good product designs merge materials, technology and hardware into a unified user experience; one where the technology recedes into the background and people benefit from the capabilities and experiences available. By focusing on functional gain, critical awareness and emotive connection, even the most multifaceted and complex technology can be made to feel straightforward and become an integral part of daily life. Researchers, designers and developers must understand how to progress or appropriate the right technical and human knowledge to inform their innovations. The 1st International Smart Design conference provides a timely forum and brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss issues, identify challenges and future directions, and share their R&D findings and experiences in the areas of design, materials and technology.

This proceedings of the 1st Smart Design conference held at Nottingham Trent University in November 2011 includes summaries of the talks given on topics ranging from intelligent textiles design to pharmaceutical packaging to the impact of social and emotional factors on design choices with the aim of informing and inspiring future application and development of smart design.

xiv box for Balanced Automation, research in this area is still young and emerging. In our opinion, the development of hybrid balanced solutions to cope with a variety of automation levels and manual approaches, is a much more challenging research problem than the search for a purely automatic solution. Various research activities described in this book illustrate some of these challenges through the development proposals, assisting tools, and initial results. In certain chapters however, the balancing aspects are not yet achieved in the research area, but their inclusion in this book is intended to give a broader and more comprehensive perspective of the multiple areas involved. One important aspect to be noticed is the extension and application of the concept of balanced automation to all areas of the manufacturing enterprise. Clearly, the need for a "balanced" approach is not restricted to the shop floor components, rather it applies to all other areas, as illustrated by the wide spectrum of research contributions found in this book. For instance, the need for an appropriate integration of multiple systems and their perspectives is particularly important for the implantation of virtual enterprises. Although both the BASYS'95 and the BASYS'96 conferences have provided important contributions, approaches, and tools for the implantation of balanced automation systems, there are a number of areas that require further research: .

This book contains the papers included in the proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on High-speed and Intercity Railways (IWHIR 2011) held in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, China from July 19 to July 22, 2011, which is organized by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, in collaboration with Southwest Jiaotong University, Beijing Jiaotong University, Dalian Jiaotong University, China Engineering Consultants, Inc., Zhejiang University, and Tsinghua University. Continuing the great initiatives and momentums of the rapid development in high-speed and intercity railways worldwide in recent years, IWHIR 2011 aims at providing a platform for academic scholars and practicing engineers to share knowledge and experience, to promote collaboration, and to strengthen R&D activities related to railway engineering. Engineers, scientists, professors, and students from universities, research institutes, and related industrial companies have been cordially invited to participate in the workshop. These papers have covered a wide range of issues concerning high-speed and intercity railways in the theoretical, numerical, and experimental work pertaining to high-speed and intercity railways. Showcasing diversity and quality, these papers report the state-of-the-art and point to future directions of research and development in this exciting area.

The flow of two-phase mixtures through restrictions. is a complex phenomenon that to date has not been fully described analytically. It is an area that received a geat deal of attention because of its application to nuclear reactor technology. The majority of the work done in this area considered ideal geometries such as nozzles, orifices and straight pipes. In the area of control valves very little work has been done. Brockett & King [1] studied subcooled water. Stiles [2] looked at subcooled freon. Martinec [4] compared subcooled freon in valves with ideal geometries. Sheldon & Schuder [3) looked experimentally at airjwater mixtures through valves that resulted in a sizing procedure. Fagerlund [10] presented an analytical model that required use of the Sheldon & Schuder data to establish the behavior of valves as opposed to more ideal geometries. However, the data used was limited to a single valve travel. Fagerlund & Storer [11] have expanded this to include several valve travels that further generalizes the technique. It is the intent of this paper to summarize a practical approach to s1z1ng valves for two-phase service that may be reduced to either a graphical or calculator procedure. Discussion of Analysis A fundamental assumption in this method is that the quality remains constant between the inlet and the vena contracta. For gas-liquid flows it is obvious providing vaporization does not occur.

Stereolithography: Materials, Processes and Applications will focus on recent advances in stereolithography covering aspects related to the most recent advances in the field, in terms of fabrication processes (two-photon polymerization, micro-stereolithography, infrared stereolithography and stereo-thermal-lithography), materials (novel resins, hydrogels for medical applications and highly reinforced resins with ceramics and metals), computer simulation and applications.

Features include: jargon-free language with well-tried, real-world examples; useful tips for managers at the end of each chapter; a comprehensive bibliography at the end of the book. It is also highly informative for graduate and undergraduate engineering students and ideally suited for establishing a web-based design management system for geographically dispersed teams. Changes in the second edition: New case studies. Expanded text in each chapter (about 50 new pages worth) including a wholly new chapter on the analysis of the design process as a whole.

In order to compete in the current commercial environment companies must produce greater product variety, at lower cost, all within a reduced product life cycle. To achieve this, a concurrent engineering philosophy is often adopted. In many cases the main realization of this is Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFM/A). There is a need for in-depth study of the architectures for DFM/A systems in order that the latest software and knowledge-based techniques may be used to deliver the DFM/A systems of tomorrow. This architecture must be based upon complete understanding of the issues involved in integrating the design and manufacturing domains. This book provides a comprehensive view of the capabilities of advanced DFM/A systems based on a common architecture.

Both academia and the real world are showing a vastly increased interest in international logistics. Although this book covers the entire topic, it may not contain sufficient detail to answer all questions. The topic-and the challenge is much larger than any single book can cover! A number of people helped us, and their assistance should be recognized. They include Robert L. Argentieri, Eunice Coleman, Patricia J. Daugherty, Robert Derbin, Robert Hannus, Ken Knox, Douglas Long, Eugene L. Magad, Dale S. Rogers, Robert Rouse, John Silvey, and Clyde Kenneth Walter. This book is designed for both the business world and the classroom. A separate Instructor's Manual has been prepared and may be requested on school letterhead from Chapman & Hall. International Logistics 1 Introduction This book is about international logistics and the international logistics system. International means that it will deal with transactions involving indi viduals or firms in more than one nation. Logistics means the organized movement of goods, ser vices, and, sometimes, people. Logistics was originally a military term. For exam ple, in author Tom Clancy's novel, Red Storm Rising, Russian General Alekseyev thought to himself about a battlefield situation: "The tactics ... no, amateurs dis cuss tactics. Professional soldiers study logistics. ,,1 When one speaks of the intema tionallogistics system, he means that huge array of carriers, forwarders, bankers, traders, and so on that facilitate international transactions, trades, and movements of goods and services. Communications are important, and a logistics system in cludes whatever communication capability it needs.

Plate structures are used in almost every area of engineering, including aerospace and naval architecture, civil engineering, and electronics. These structures have diverse geometries and have to withstand a wide range of loading conditions. This book provides the theoretical foundations of the theories of plates manufactured from various materials, outlines and illustrates the methods used for the analysis of these structures, and emphasizes designs and solution techniques available to an engineer. The book is written for engineers working in industry, graduate students at aerospace, mechanical, civil engineering and naval architecture departments, and investigators interested in the development of the theory of plates and related subjects. While the mathematical modeling employed in the book is understandable to both engineers and graduate students, the book also provides insight into relevant phenomena and theories underlying plate structures. Thus, the reader is equipped with a thorough understanding of the problems and appropriate assumptions, even if the analysis is conducted using commercially available software codes. In addition, the book includes numerous analytical solutions that can confidently be used in the design of plate structures. The combination of theoretical insight and references to practical problems makes the book equally attractive to academia and industry.

Dealing with environmental issues should no longer be considered simply as a cost of doing business. Effective environmental improvements to a company's products and services can be turned into business opportunities. This book was written with the express purpose of helping managers of companies, in particular of Small to Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs), to better deal with environmental challenges and address customer requirements, all in order to turn their environmental inve- ments into competitive market advantages. Several examples are provided throughout the book, but also warning signs (Alert Boxes). These "Alerts" are posted to help managers avoid typical traps when working with environmental considerations in business processes. The authors have many years of experience in the various aspects of impleme- ing Ecodesign. This experience includes working in industry for many years; le- ing the environmental departments in a multinational company; managing research projects in eco-product development; Life Cycle Assessment; and national and international environmental communication and marketing. This book is the latest in a series. The 2002 "Ecodesign Pilot" introduced a tool and software to help design more environmentally compatible products. It was directed specifically at designers. The 2004 book, "Ecodesign Implementation," was written to help project managers optimize product development processes from an environmental perspective.

We describe in this book, bio-inspired models and applications of hybrid intel- gent systems using soft computing techniques for image analysis and pattern r- ognition based on biometrics and other information sources. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several intelligent computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks, and bio-inspired optimization algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems. The book is organized in five main parts, which contain a group of papers around a similar subject. The first part consists of papers with the main theme of classification methods and applications, which are basically papers that propose new models for classification to solve general pr- lems and applications. The second part contains papers with the main theme of modular neural networks in pattern recognition, which are basically papers using bio-inspired techniques, like modular neural networks, for achieving pattern r- ognition based on biometric measures. The third part contains papers with the theme of bio-inspired optimization methods and applications to diverse problems. The fourth part contains papers that deal with general theory and algorithms of bio-inspired methods, like neural networks and evolutionary algorithms. The fifth part contains papers on computer vision applications of soft computing methods. In the part of classification methods and applications there are 5 papers that - scribe different contributions on fuzzy logic and bio-inspired models with appli- tion in classification for medical images and other data.

The current marketplace is undergoing an accelerated pace of change that challenges corporations to innovate new techniques to respond rapidly to an ever-changing environment. At the center of this changing environment is a new generation of empowered buyers (customers) equipped with fast evolving technologies that allow them to buy from markets scattered across the globe. Empowering the customers has deprived organizations of what was once their right-to introduce new products slowly, at their own leisure. Organizations used to introduce new products every few years, and, for the most part, products offered limited functionalities and features. A low-priced quality product-irrespective of customer satisfaction-was a guaranteed ticket for success. New global economies and global markets changed business practices and focused on the customer as the major player in the economy. Organizations now fail or succeed based upon their ability to respond quickly to changing customer demands and to utilize new technological innovations. In such an environment, the advantage goes to the firm that can offer greater varieties of new products with higher performance and greater overall appeal. In order to compete in this fast-paced global market, organizations need to produce products that can be easily configured to offer distinctive capabilities compared to the competition. Furthermore, organizations need to develop new methods and techniques to react rapidly to required changes in products and market trends and to shorten the product development cycle, which will enable them to gain more economic competitiveness.

The importance of proper geometric dimensioning and tolerancing as a means of expressing the designer's functional intent and controlling the inevitable geometric and dimensional variations of mechanical parts and assemblies, is becoming well recognized. The research efforts and innovations in the field of tolerancing design, the development of supporting tools, techniques and algorithms, and the significant advances in computing software and hardware all have contributed to its recognition as a viable area of serious scholarly contributions. The field of tolerancing design is successfully making the transition to maturity where deeper insights and sound theories are being developed to offer explanations, and reliable implementations are introduced to provide solutions. Machine designers realized very early that manufacturing processes do not produce the nominal dimensions of designed parts. The notion of associating a lower and an upper limit, referred to as tolerances, with each dimen sion was introduced. Tolerances were specified to ensure the proper function of mating features. Fits of mating features included clearances, location fits, and interference fits, with various sub-grades in each category assigned a tolerance value depending on the nominal size of the mating features. During the inspection process, a part is rejected if a dimension fell outside the specified range. As the accuracy requirements in assemblies became tighter, designers had to consider other critical dimensions and allocate tolerances to them in order to ensure the assembly's functionality.

The need exists in the private sector and government manufacturing sites to reduce product development time, production lead times, inventory, and non-value added activities. At the same time, there is increased pressure to improve manufacturing process yields, produc tion efficiency, and resource utilization. Much of the technology required to meet these needs already exists, but an integrated structure that can demonstrate the potential for the technology in a concurrent engineering context does not. This book provides a road map for building the integrated technology environment to evaluate existing products, manufacturing processes and system design tools. This book details innovative approaches that will significantly improve design/manufacturing technology development and deploy ment capabilities for civilian and defense applications. These approaches are integrated product, process, and system design (IPPSD) initiatives which will greatly enhance the manufacturing competitiveness of the economy. These approaches involve the use of simulation, modeling tools and computerized virtual workstations in conjunction with a design environment which allows a diverse group of researchers, manufacturers, and suppliers to work within a comprehensive network of shared knowledge. The IPPSD infrastructure consists of virtual workstations, servers and a suite of simulation, quantitative, computa tional, analytical, experimental and qualitative tools. Such an IPPSD infrastructure will permit effective and efficient predictions of complete product design, manufacturing proces design, and customer satisfac tion.

This book is concerned with Intelligent Control methods and applications. The field of intelligent control has been expanded very much during the recent years and a solid body of theoretical and practical results are now available. These results have been obtained through the synergetic fusion of concepts and techniques from a variety of fields such as automatic control, systems science, computer science, neurophysiology and operational research. Intelligent control systems have to perform anthropomorphic tasks fully autonomously or interactively with the human under known or unknown and uncertain environmental conditions. Therefore the basic components of any intelligent control system include cognition, perception, learning, sensing, planning, numeric and symbolic processing, fault detection/repair, reaction, and control action. These components must be linked in a systematic, synergetic and efficient way. Predecessors of intelligent control are adaptive control, self-organizing control, and learning control which are well documented in the literature. Typical application examples of intelligent controls are intelligent robotic systems, intelligent manufacturing systems, intelligent medical systems, and intelligent space teleoperators. Intelligent controllers must employ both quantitative and qualitative information and must be able to cope with severe temporal and spatial variations, in addition to the fundamental task of achieving the desired transient and steady-state performance. Of course the level of intelligence required in each particular application is a matter of discussion between the designers and users. The current literature on intelligent control is increasing, but the information is still available in a sparse and disorganized way.

In this volume the investigations of filtering problems, a start on which has been made in 55], are being continued and are devoted to theoretical problems of processing stochastic fields. The derivation of the theory of processing stochastic fields is similar to that of the theory extensively developed for stochastic processes ('stochastic fields with a one-dimensional domain'). Nevertheless there exist essential distinctions between these cases making a construction of the theory for the multi-dimensional case in such a way difficult. Among these are the absence of the notion of the 'past-future' in the case of fields, which plays a fundamental role in constructing stochastic processes theory. So attempts to introduce naturally the notion of the causality (non-anticipativity) when synthesising stable filters designed for processing fields have not met with success. Mathematically, principal distinctions between multi-dimensional and one-dimensional cases imply that the set of roots of a multi-variable polyno mial does not necessary consist of a finite number of isolated points. From the main theorem of algebra it follows that in the one-dimensional case every poly nomial of degree n has just n roots (considering their multiplicity) in the com plex plane. As a consequence, in particular, an arbitrary rational function cents(."

Advances in Structural Optimization presents the techniques for a wide set of applications, ranging from the problems of size and shape optimization (historically the first to be studied) to topology and material optimization. Structural models are considered that use both discrete and finite elements. Structural materials can be classical or new. Emerging methods are also addressed, such as automatic differentiation, intelligent structures optimization, integration of structural optimization in concurrent engineering environments, and multidisciplinary optimization. For researchers and designers in industries such as aerospace, automotive, mechanical, civil, nuclear, naval and offshore. A reference book for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on structural optimization and optimum design.

Environmental Design is becoming an increasingly significant agenda for many manufacturing companies and yet there is no standard to their approaches, strategies or their levels of execution. Applying Design for Environment (DfE) methodologies to develop a more sustainable supply chain has formed procedures and techniques which allow designers to integrate these methods with environmental supply chain management. Design for Environment as a Tool for the Development of a Sustainable Supply Chain aims to define relevant target specifications for a product throughout its life cycle; from conception and design to the end of its operating life. Be considering this new approach to the supply chain, environmental responsiveness can work in tandem with sounds business management. The usual focus on suppliers, manufacturers and customers is expanded in Design for Environment as a Tool for the Development of a Sustainable Supply Chain to include stakeholders such as government bodies and recycling companies. The influence of these additional groups is analyzed alongside concepts such as: Product life cycle development aimed at environmental impact minimization; Supplier selection and management based on environmental criteria; and Marketing and communication choices which increase the value of environmentally sensitive products. By including several case studies alongside theoretical topics, Design for Environment as a Tool for the Development of a Sustainable Supply Chains acts as a foundation for professionals across the supply chain, from industrial designers to marketing and sales departments, who are involved in environmental issues.

Darwin2K: An Evolutionary Approach to Automated Design for Robotics is an essential reference tool for researchers, professionals, and students involved in robot design or in evolutionary synthesis, design, and optimization. It is also necessary for users of Darwin2K. Researchers and hobbyists interested in genetic algorithms and artificial life techniques will find the book interesting. The primary purpose of this book is to describe a methodology for using computers to automatically design robots to meet the specific needs of an application. Details of many novel aspects of the methodology are presented, including an evolutionary algorithm for synthesizing and optimizing multiple objective functions, an algorithm for dynamic simulation of arbitrary robots, an extensible software architecture, and a new representation for robots that is appropriate for robot design. The methodology as a whole is significant in terms of its impact on robot design practices, and as a case study in building evolutionary design systems. Individual parts of the systems are also relevant to other areas. For example, the evolutionary algorithm can be used for design and optimization problems other than robotics, and the dynamic simulation algorithm can be used for analysis and simulation of existing robots or as a part of a manual design tool. The book also gives an overview of previous work in automated design of robots, and of evolutionary design in other engineering disciplines.