Powerful and elegantly simple.

Achieve higher quality...lower costs...faster time to market

Companies worldwide have used the methods of quality expert Genichi Taguchi for the past 30 years with phenomenal product development cost savings and quality improvements. Robust Engineering, by this three-time Deming Prize winner, along with Subir Chowdhury and Shin Taguchi, is the first book to explain and illustrate his newest, most revolutionary methodology, Technology Development. It joins Design of Experiments and Robust Design as the framework on which your company can build a competitive edge. Case studies of real-world organizations Ford, ITT, 3M, Minolta, NASA, Nissan, Xerox and 9 others show you how the techniques of all three methodologies can be
successfully applied. Youll hammer flexibility into your manufacturing organization to minimize product development costs, reduce product time-to-market, and fully satisfy customers needs.

Project Management is going to be huge in the next decade...--Fortune

Busy managers single-source guide to planning, organizing and controlling projects

At last theres a concise, compact (5Ó x 8Ó) hands-on guide that puts state-of-the-art management concepts and processes at your fingertips. Project Managers Portable Handbook, by David I. Cleland and Lewis R.
Ireland, is your step-by-step guide to the nuts-and-bolts details that spell project management success. YouÕre shown how to organize and manage everything from small to multiple projects...lead and coach project team
members...and manage within a strategic context from project
partnering to dealing with the board of directors and other stakeholders.
Youll find out how to:
Select and use PM software; Develop winning proposals;
Handle legal considerations; Come out on top in contract

The field of "On-Line Fault Detection and Supervision in the Chemical Process Industries" is relatively young. Major activity in this area has taken place only in the last fifteen years. The goals of the first workshop in Delaware were to discuss various methodologies necessary for solving industrial problems in fault diagnosis/supervision and to encourage interactions between academia and industry. This workshop also focused on development and evaluation of methodologies for on-line fault detection and supervision in the chemical process industries. It addressed theory, application, validation, performance and evaluation of methodologies such as parameter estimation, observers, parity equations, signal analysis methods, classification, rule-based systems with probabilistic approaches, fuzzy logic and neural networks.

There are several trends that make the topic of this workshop especially relevant in today's world. The first is the tremendous advances made in automation and information technology that can potentially bring in an ever-increasing amount of information on to computer screens in the operating room of a plant. Avoiding problems of information overload and converting plant data to "on-line useful knowledge" is a key challenge. In some respects, one can draw parallels here to biological evolution where, over billions of years, human beings have evolved "mental models" to interpret the huge amount of information received through their senses. In the absence of the time advantage that evolution has had, we have to rely on methodologies such as those presented in this workshop to provide assistance to operators and engineers in interpreting plant information.

A second trend that makes this field relevant in today's world is the increasing emphasis on environment and safety. Community activism and accidents such as those in Bhopal, India have caused media spotlights to be turned on the smallest of toxic releases or loss of life due to chemical accidents. The negative publicity generated by such events as well as the need to maintain the image of an environmentally conscious company make industry more sensitive to the issues of early detection of faults.

The third trend that makes this field very relevant is that of the globalization of the world economy. Increasing globalization of the chemical process industry puts pressure on economic competitiveness and higher productivity. This implies reduced down-time due to faults, quick and flexible response of production to supply and demand changes, increasing reliance on automation and reduced personnel.

It is increasingly accepted that future dependable, real-time digital computer control systems will have distributed architectures. Advantages of distributed computer control systems include the possibility of composing large systems out of pre-tested components with minimal integration effort, their well-defined fault containment properties and their capacity to make effective use of mass-produced silicon chips.

The IFAC Workshop series on Distributed Computer Control Systems (DCCS) focuses on design requirements and fundamental principles encountered in such systems and highlights and traces the growth of key concepts at their various stages of development. Theoretical and application-oriented viewpoints receive equal emphasis. These Workshops also provide an excellent forum for the exchange of information on recent technological advances and practices in the distributed computer control field.

The 1997 DCCS Workshop was notable for the attention given to practical implementations of ideas that have been under discussion for decades and maintained the high technical standard set by previous Workshops in the series - the policy of concentrating on a specific topic, inviting a number of key authors and of accepting only a limited number of papers paid dividends.

This volume contains the proceedings of the IFAC Workshop on "Singular Solutions and Perturbations in Control Systems "(SSPCS-97) held at Pereslavl-Zalessky, Russia on 7-11 July 1997. The Workshop was sponsored by IFAC and organized jointly by the Russian National Committee of Automatic Control, the Program Systems Institute and the Institute for Information Transmission Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Pereslavl.

The objective of this workshop was to provide an international forum for the discussion of recent developments and advances in the fields of singular control problems, impulsive control, singular perturbations technique in control systems, computational problems and others.

The Workshop was devoted both to theoretical and applicative aspects of the so-called "nonclassical" problems in the area of control theory, such as problems with singular perturbations, impulse and generalized controls. These problems arise in various areas of applications, including mechanics, information processing, medicine and economy. At the same time they stimulate the development of new mathematical tools in the classical theory of control and differential equations.

All papers included in this volume are given in the form presented by the authors.

Control often follows predictions: predictive control has been highly successful in producing robust and practical solutions in many real-life, real-time applications. Adaptive prediction covers a variety of ways of adding 'intelligence' to predictive control techniques. Many different groups, with widely varying disciplinary backgrounds and approaches, are tackling the same problem from different angles; these groups are sometimes unaware of alternative approaches from other disciplines. This book attempts to give a unified and comprehensive coverage of the principles and methods that these groups have developed. It avoids basing its descriptions on very complex mathematical formulations but still gives a rigorous exposure to the subject, and illustrates the theory with many practical examples. It is chiefly aimed at students, researchers and practitioners, but will also be accessible to the non-specialist.

On-line and off-line quality control are the two methods used to discern a products reliability of quality. Though they are disparate techniques, both methods are used to achieve the same result. This introductory textbook integrates the two techniques to present a wide coverage of statistical methods of quality control. The text is compact, stressing the key ideas and concepts rather than trying to cover each method in complete depth. Statistical Aspects of Quality Control is an excellent starting point for a student interested in learning more about the field of statistical quality control. References and suggested readings are included at the end of each chapter.
* Presents statistical quality control in a compact fashion that stresses key ideas and concepts
* Uses the concept of Average Run Length to compare the different control charts, such as Shewhart, moving average, and cusum
* Introduces the Taguchi approach to quality design
* Includes information on acceptance sampling
* Concludes each chapter with final comments, references, and examples to illustrate the methods discussed

Praise for the Series:
"This book will be a useful reference to control engineers and researchers. The papers contained cover well the recent advances in the field of modern control theory."
-IEEE Group Correspondence
"This book will help all those researchers who valiantly try to keep abreast of what is new in the theory and practice of optimal control."
--Control

The term ""Taguchi methods"" was coined in the United States. It pertains to the evaluation and improvement of the robustness of products - or what may also be termed ""quality engineering"". The purpose of this book is to explain these terms and it is aimed at managers, technology developers and engineers of manufacturing enterprises. The book contains a general discussion about the productivity of manufacturing enterprises, which is equivalent to cost reduction and quality improvement at the following five manufacturing stages - technology development, product planning, product design, design of the production process and management of the production process.

Philipp Wittke charakterisiert spanlos gefertigte Innengewinde aus den Aluminium- und Magnesiumlegierungen AlSi10Mg, AZ31 und AZ91. Neben der Entwicklung einer zerstoerungsfreien Methode zur Beurteilung der Gewindequalitat werden vom Autor grundlagenorientierte Untersuchungen durchgefuhrt, um den Einfluss von Prozessparametervariationen wahrend der Gewindefertigung auf die Mikrostrukturen und somit auf die quasistatischen und zyklischen Eigenschaften der Innengewinde zu ermitteln. In diesem Zuge werden Strategien zur Abkurzung der Versuchszeiten fur zyklische Untersuchungen entwickelt, bei denen mittels anwendungsoptimierter Sensorik charakteristische Kennwerte zur Lebensdauervorhersage ermittelt werden. Der Autor: Philipp Wittke arbeitete als wissenschaftlich Beschaftigter am Fachgebiet Werkstoffpruftechnik (WPT) der Technischen Universitat Dortmund und schloss dort seine Promotion mit dem Fokus auf die zeiteffiziente Charakterisierung der Ermudungseigenschaften neuartiger Gewindeverbindungen in Kooperation mit dem Institut fur Spanende Fertigung (ISF) der Technischen Universitat Dortmund ab.

Dieses Buch behandelt die wichtigsten Aspekte des European Train Control System (ETCS) als Bestandteil des European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS). Lars Schnieder fuhrt, ausgehend von den rechtlichen Grundlagen, in die technischen Grundprinzipien von ETCS ein. Der Autor stellt den Aufbau- und die Wirkungsweise der unterschiedlichen Ausrustungsstufen dar und beschreibt die einzelnen Komponenten der Fahrzeug- und Streckeneinrichtung. Mit den von ETCS unterstutzten Betriebsarten wird aufgezeigt, wie ETCS in den verschiedenen Landern in den Bahnbetrieb integriert werden kann. Durch die Darstellung grundlegender technischer Zusammenhange und Sicherungsfunktionen wird ein Verstandnis fur das zukunftige einheitliche Europaische Zugsteuerungs- und Zugsicherungssystem geschaffen.

Innerstadtische Schienenverkehrssysteme stossen bei steigender Verkehrsnachfrage zunehmend an ihre Grenzen. Die Sicherheit und die Leistungsfahigkeit dieser Verkehrssysteme werden wesentlich durch die eingesetzte Leit- und Sicherungstechnik bestimmt. Eine Ausweitung des Verkehrsangebots erfordert leistungsfahige signaltechnische Systeme, die als Communications-Based Train Control (CBTC) bezeichnet werden. Lars Schnieder stellt in diesem essential die Systemumgebung dar, in die sich die CBTC-Systeme in Nahverkehrsunternehmen integrieren. Daruber hinaus leitet er her, welchen Beitrag die einzelnen Sicherungsfunktionen von CBTC-Loesungen zur Gefahrdungsbeherrschung leisten. Auf dieser Grundlage zeigt der Autor, wie mit zunehmender Automatisierung sukzessive ein hoeherer Funktionsumfang von technischen Systemen ubernommen wird. Zum Abschluss diskutiert er an CBTC-Systeme gestellte nicht-funktionale Anforderungen wie Sicherheit, Verfugbarkeit, Leistungsfahigkeit und Wirtschaftlichkeit. Der Autor: Dr.-Ing. Lars Schnieder verantwortet in einer Software-Entwicklungsfirma das Geschaftsfeld Sicherheitsbegutachtung. Er ist international als anerkannter Sachverstandiger fur Zugsicherungsanlagen tatig.

Dieser Buchtitel ist Teil des Digitalisierungsprojekts Springer Book Archives mit Publikationen, die seit den Anfangen des Verlags von 1842 erschienen sind. Der Verlag stellt mit diesem Archiv Quellen fur die historische wie auch die disziplingeschichtliche Forschung zur Verfugung, die jeweils im historischen Kontext betrachtet werden mussen. Dieser Titel erschien in der Zeit vor 1945 und wird daher in seiner zeittypischen politisch-ideologischen Ausrichtung vom Verlag nicht beworben.

The validation of equipment, processes and methods is a basic requirement that nowadays has to be met in most industries. This handbook deals with the validation of computerized systems in general as well as with analytical method validation. The many detailed practical examples focus on thermal analysis of materials, such as plastics and rubber. The handbook is intended for newcomers interested in the theoretical and regulatory aspects of validation and for thermal analysis practitioners who have to validate their equipment and methods.

Reliability, Maintainability and Risk: Practical Methods for Engineers, Ninth Edition, has taught reliability and safety engineers techniques to minimize process design, operation defects, and failures for 35 years. For beginners, the book provides tactics on how to avoid pitfalls in this complex and wide field. For experts in the field, well-described, realistic, and illustrative examples and case studies add new insight and assistance. The author uses his 40 years of experience to create a comprehensive and detailed guide to the field, also providing an excellent description of reliability and risk computation concepts. The book is organized into five parts. Part One covers reliability parameters and costs traces the history of reliability and safety technology, presenting a cost-effective approach to quality, reliability, and safety. Part Two deals with the interpretation of failure rates, while Part Three focuses on the prediction of reliability and risk. Part Four discusses design and assurance techniques, review and testing techniques, reliability growth modeling, field data collection and feedback, predicting and demonstrating repair times, quantified reliability maintenance, and systematic failures, while Part 5 deals with legal, management and safety issues, such as project management, product liability, and safety legislation.