The blurring of boundaries between hitherto distinct scientific disciplines, technologies or markets is a common and powerful phenomenon. Subjects of this convergence often change consumer behaviours, favouring products and platforms with multiple functions. The Anticipation of Converging Industries provides a detailed focus on the triggers, drivers and consequences of convergence to create a more concise definition of convergence. This detailed analysis includes a specifically developed toolbox for 'convergence foresight', creating a forecasting method for convergence trends. With the focus on the chemical, biotechnological and pharmaceutical industries, several indicators of convergence in the areas of Nutraceuticals/Functional Foods, Cosmeceuticals and ICT are derived from samples including over 1million patents and scientific publications. By supporting this methodical approach with real world data, The Anticipation of Converging Industries is perfect for industry practitioners looking for a competitive edge in the present and for the future. Similarly, academics will find a comprehensive theoretical concept for better understanding the underlying rationale of convergence at their disposal

Three Dimensional Weaving is a nascent technology which has triggered research interests around the world. The technology has the potential to finely balance the in-plane and out-of plane properties in composites. This state-of-the-art book focuses on three emerging 3D weaving technologies viz., Orthogonal weaving, Angle interlock weaving and Dual Plane shedding based 3D weaving. It provides focused knowledge about these technologies and has a pragmatic approach to developing customized 3D weaving machines. Fundamental approach to understanding weave design basics, thereupon practical weaving , addressing quality aspects, arriving at testing approaches are all detailed in the book. The applications for these technologies are both in strategic (space, aerospace, defense) as well as societal (medical, automobile) sectors. The book has six chapters, wherein the first three chapters are devoted to Orthogonal and angle interlock weaving and their quality control aspects. Approach to weaving preforms of complex geometries such as T-stiffeners, tapers, Origami-based structures are also discussed The fourth and fifth chapter are entirely devoted to machinery development for Dual plane shedding based 3D weaving often termed as 'True 3D weaving'. The chapters discuss detailed machine design of the sub-elements such as let-off, shedding, picking, beat-up and take-up. The reader is taken through a prototype development of a 3D weaving machine by way of concept, illustrations, practical development and weaving of samples. The sixth chapter summarises the editor's views about the technology. This volume will be beneficial to scientists and researchers in both academia and the industry.

This book presents statistical processes for health care delivery and covers new ideas, methods and technologies used to improve health care organizations. It gathers the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Health Care Systems Engineering (HCSE 2017), which took place in Florence, Italy from May 29 to 31, 2017. The Conference provided a timely opportunity to address operations research and operations management issues in health care delivery systems. Scientists and practitioners discussed new ideas, methods and technologies for improving the operations of health care systems, developed in close collaborations with clinicians. The topics cover a broad spectrum of concrete problems that pose challenges for researchers and practitioners alike: hospital drug logistics, operating theatre management, home care services, modeling, simulation, process mining and data mining in patient care and health care organizations.

One of the most critical issues facing supply chain managers in today's globalized and highly uncertain business environments is how to deal proactively with disruptions that might affect the complicated supply networks characterizing modern enterprises. Supply Chain Disruptions: Theory and Practice of Managing Risk presents a state-of the-art perspective on this particular issue. Supply Chain Disruptions: Theory and Practice of Managing Risk demonstrates that effective management of supply disruptions necessitates both strategic and tactical measures - the former involving optimal design of supply networks; the latter involving inventory, finance and demand management. It shows that managers ought to use all available levers at their disposal throughout the supply network - like sourcing and pricing strategies, providing financial subsidies, encouraging information sharing and incentive alignment between supply chain partners - in order to tackle supply disruptions. The editors combine up-to-date academic research with the latest operational risk management practices used in industry to demonstrate how theoreticians and practitioners can learn from each other. As well as providing a wealth of knowledge for students and professors who are interested in pursuing research or teaching courses in the rapidly growing area of supply chain risk management, Supply Chain Disruptions: Theory and Practice of Managing Risk also acts as a ready reference for practitioners who are interested in understanding the theoretical underpinnings of effective supply disruption management techniques.

Human and organizational factors have a substantial impact on the performance of planning and scheduling processes. Despite widespread and advanced decision support systems, human decision makers are still crucial to improve the operational performance in manufacturing industries. In this text, the state of the art in this area is discussed by experts from a wide variety of engineering and social science disciplines. Moreover, recent results from collaborative studies and a number of field cases are presented. The text is targeted at researchers and graduate students, but is also particularly useful for managers, consultants, and system developers to better understand how human performance can be advanced.

Quality control in pharmaceutical products and medical devices is vital for users as failing to comply with national and international regulations can lead to accidents that could easily be avoided. For this reason, manufacturing a quality medical product will support patient safety. Microbiologists working in both the pharmaceutical and medical device industries face considerable challenges in keeping abreast of the myriad microbiological references available to them and the continuously evolving regulatory requirements. Quality Control Applications in the Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Manufacturing Industry presents the importance of quality control in pharmaceutical products and medical devices, which must have very high-quality standards to not cause problems to the health of patients. It reinforces and updates the knowledge of analytical, instrumental, and biological methods to demonstrate the correct quality control and good manufacturing practice for pharmaceutical products and medical devices. Covering topics such as pharmaceutical nano systems, machine learning, and software validation, this book is an essential resource for managers, engineers, supervisors, pharmacists, chemists, academicians, and researchers.

"...a comprehensive and well written book, which...will be useful reading for both researchers entering the field and experienced specialists looking for new ideas....a valuable and long-lasting contribution to experimental mechanics." - Stepan Lomov, KU Leuven This expert volume, an enhanced Habilitation thesis by the head of the Materials Testing Research Group at the University of Augsburg, provides detailed coverage of a range of inspection methods for insitu characterization of fiber-reinforced composites. The failure behavior of fiber reinforced composites is a complex evolution of microscopic damage phenomena. Beyond the use of classical testing methods, the ability to monitor the progression of damage insitu offers new ways to interpret the materials failure modes. Methods covered include digital image correlation, acoustic emission, electromagnetic emission, computed tomography, thermography, shearography, and promising method combinations. For each method, the discussion includes operational principles and practical applications for quality control as well as thoughtful assessment of the method's strengths and weakness so that the reader is equipped to decide which method or methods are most appropriate in a given situation. The book includes extensive appendices covering common experimental parameters influencing comparability of acoustic emission measurements; materials properties for modeling; and an overview of terms and abbreviations.

A formal method is not the main engine of a development process, its contribution is to improve system dependability by motivating formalisation where useful. This book summarizes the results of the DEPLOY research project on engineering methods for dependable systems through the industrial deployment of formal methods in software development. The applications considered were in automotive, aerospace, railway, and enterprise information systems, and microprocessor design. The project introduced a formal method, Event-B, into several industrial organisations and built on the lessons learned to provide an ecosystem of better tools, documentation and support to help others to select and introduce rigorous systems engineering methods. The contributing authors report on these projects and the lessons learned. For the academic and research partners and the tool vendors, the project identified improvements required in the methods and supporting tools, while the industrial partners learned about the value of formal methods in general. A particular feature of the book is the frank assessment of the managerial and organisational challenges, the weaknesses in some current methods and supporting tools, and the ways in which they can be successfully overcome. The book will be of value to academic researchers, systems and software engineers developing critical systems, industrial managers, policymakers, and regulators.

Recent Advances in Maintenance and Infrastructure Management is a collection of papers highlighting the state of the art in maintenance of large structures and management of infrastructures. The papers selected in this book are written by international experts from academia and industry, and were presented during the past three International Conference on Maintenance Management (MM Conferences) held from 2005 to 2007 and organized by CNIM (Italian National Committee for Maintenance). The selected papers are categorized into four thematic areas: 1. reliability and maintenance; 2. mathematical modeling and metrics for maintenance; 3. maintenance management and organization, and; 4. facilities management and contracting. The papers cover topics ranging from embedded sensors for diagnostics of structures to organizational issues related to effective maintenance planning. Recent Advances in Maintenance and Infrastructure Management provides readers with a snapshot of the latest developments in the tools and techniques used to conduct maintenance of complex infrastructures and systems. The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in academia and industry involved in planning and deployment of maintenance operations. Additionally, this can serve as a reference text for advanced courses in operations management, and structural health monitoring.

This book presents selected contributions on a wide range of scientific and technological areas covered by AITeM (the Italian Association of Manufacturing). It discusses the following topics: additive manufacturing, advanced and unconventional machining and processes, material removal processes, foundry and forming, tools and machine tools, assembly/disassembly, joining materials and material properties, quality metrology and material testing, manufacturing systems engineering, sustainable manufacturing, smart manufacturing and cyber-physical systems, education in manufacturing and human factors, industrial applications. Written by young AITeM associates, the contributions reflect the multifaceted nature of the research in manufacturing, which takes advantage of emergent technologies and establishes interdisciplinary connections with various scientific and technological areas to move beyond simple product fabrication and develop a complex and highly interconnected value creation processes ecosystem pursuing high-value-added products to compete globally.

This book highlights some of the latest research advances and cutting-edge analyses of real-world case studies on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management from diverse international contexts, while also identifying business applications for the latest findings and innovations in operations management and the decision sciences. It gathers a selection of the best papers presented at the XXII International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Industrial Management, which was promoted by ADINGOR (Asociacion para el Desarrollo de la Ingenieria de Organizacion) and held at the Escola Politecnica Superior of the Universitat de Girona, Spain, on July 12th and 13th, 2018.

Billions of dollars are being spent annually world-wide to develop reliable and good quality products and services. Global competition and other factors are forcing manufacturers and others to produce highly reliable and good quality products and services. This means that reliability and quality principles are now being applied across many diverse sectors of economy and each of these sectors (robotics, health care, power generation, the Internet, textile, food and software) has tailored reliability and quality principles, methods, and procedures to satisfy its specific need.

Reliability and quality professionals working in these areas need to know about each other's work activities because this may help them - directly or indirectly - to perform their tasks more effectively. Applied Reliability and Quality: Fundamentals, Methods and Procedures meets the need for a single volume that considers applied areas of both reliability and quality. Before now, there has not been one book that covers both applied reliability and quality; so to gain knowledge of each other's specialties, these people had to study various books, articles, or reports on each area.

As the first book of its kind, Applied Reliability and Quality: Fundamentals, Methods and Procedures will be useful to design engineers, manufacturing engineers, system engineers, engineering and manufacturing managers, reliability specialists, quality specialists, graduate and senior undergraduate students of engineering, researchers and instructors of reliability and quality, and professionals in areas such as health care, software, power generation, robotics, textile, food, and the Internet.

Modeling and Control of Batch Processes presents state-of-the-art techniques ranging from mechanistic to data-driven models. These methods are specifically tailored to handle issues pertinent to batch processes, such as nonlinear dynamics and lack of online quality measurements. In particular, the book proposes: a novel batch control design with well characterized feasibility properties; a modeling approach that unites multi-model and partial least squares techniques; a generalization of the subspace identification approach for batch processes; and applications to several detailed case studies, ranging from a complex simulation test bed to industrial data. The book's proposed methodology employs statistical tools, such as partial least squares and subspace identification, and couples them with notions from state-space-based models to provide solutions to the quality control problem for batch processes. Practical implementation issues are discussed to help readers understand the application of the methods in greater depth. The book includes numerous comments and remarks providing insight and fundamental understanding into the modeling and control of batch processes. Modeling and Control of Batch Processes includes many detailed examples of industrial relevance that can be tailored by process control engineers or researchers to a specific application. The book is also of interest to graduate students studying control systems, as it contains new research topics and references to significant recent work. Advances in Industrial Control reports and encourages the transfer of technology in control engineering. The rapid development of control technology has an impact on all areas of the control discipline. The series offers an opportunity for researchers to present an extended exposition of new work in all aspects of industrial control.

This book reports on an outstanding research devoted to modeling and control of dynamic systems using fractional-order calculus. It describes the development of model-based control design methods for systems described by fractional dynamic models. More than 300 years had passed since Newton and Leibniz developed a set of mathematical tools we now know as calculus. Ever since then the idea of non-integer derivatives and integrals, universally referred to as fractional calculus, has been of interest to many researchers. However, due to various issues, the usage of fractional-order models in real-life applications was limited. Advances in modern computer science made it possible to apply efficient numerical methods to the computation of fractional derivatives and integrals. This book describes novel methods developed by the author for fractional modeling and control, together with their successful application in real-world process control scenarios.

This book presents intuitive explanations of the principles and applications of power system resiliency, as well as a number of straightforward and practical methods for the impact analysis of risk events on power system operations. It also describes the challenges of modelling, distribution networks, optimal scheduling, multi-stage planning, deliberate attacks, cyber-physical systems and SCADA-based smart grids, and how to overcome these challenges. Further, it highlights the resiliency issues using various methods, including strengthening the system against high impact events with low frequency and the fast recovery of the system properties. A large number of specialists have collaborated to provide innovative solutions and research in power systems resiliency. They discuss the fundamentals and contemporary materials of power systems resiliency, theoretical and practical issues, as well as current issues and methods for controlling the risk attacks and other threats to AC power systems. The book includes theoretical research, significant results, case studies, and practical implementation processes to offer insights into electric power and engineering and energy systems. Showing how systems should respond in case of malicious attacks, and helping readers to decide on the best approaches, this book is essential reading for electrical engineers, researchers and specialists. The book is also useful as a reference for undergraduate and graduate students studying the resiliency and reliability of power systems.

This book comprises select proceedings of the International Conference on Futuristic Trends in Materials and Manufacturing (ICFTMM) 2019. It covers latest findings and challenges in manufacturing processes and characterization of different advanced materials. Latest fabrication techniques of polymer based materials, biomaterials, and energy materials along with their practical applications are discussed. The contents also focus on cost-effective and energy-efficient sustainable and green manufacturing technologies. The contents of this book will be useful for students, researchers as well as industry professionals interested in characterization and fabrication of materials.

The revised edition of this book offers an expanded overview of the reliability design of mechanical systems and describes the reliability methodology, including a parametric accelerated life test (ALT) plan, a load analysis, a tailored series of parametric ALTs with action plans, and an evaluation of the final designs to ensure the design requirements are satisfied. It covers both the quantitative and qualitative approaches of the reliability design forming in the development process of mechanical products, with a focus on parametric ALT and illustrated via case studies. This new reliability methodology - parametric ALT should help mechanical and civil engineers to uncover design parameters improving product design and avoiding recalls. Updated chapters cover product recalls and assessment of their significance, modern definitions in reliability engineering, parametric accelerated life testing in mechanical systems, and extended case studies. For this revised edition, one new chapter has been introduced to reflect recent developments in analysis of fluid motion and mechanical vibration. Other chapters are expanded and updated to improve the explanation of topics including structures and load analysis, failure mechanics, design and reliability testing, and mechanical system failure. The broad scope gives the reader an overview of the state-of-the-art in the reliability design of mechanical systems and an indication of future directions and applications. It will serve as a solid introduction to the field for advanced students, and a valuable reference for those working in the development of mechanical systems and related areas.

Understanding the fatigue behaviour of structural components under variable load amplitude is an essential prerequisite for safe and reliable light-weight design. For designing and dimensioning, the expected stress (load) is compared with the capacity to withstand loads (fatigue strength). In this process, the safety necessary for each particular application must be ensured. A prerequisite for ensuring the required fatigue strength is a reliable load assumption. The authors describe the transformation of the stress- and load-time functions which have been measured under operational conditions to spectra or matrices with the application of counting methods. The aspects which must be considered for ensuring a reliable load assumption for designing and dimensioning are discussed in detail. Furthermore, the theoretical background for estimating the fatigue life of structural components is explained, and the procedures are discussed for numerous applications in practice. One of the prime intentions of the authors is to provide recommendations which can be implemented in practical applications.

The book shows how simulation's long history and close ties to industry since the third industrial revolution have led to its growing importance in Industry 4.0. The book emphasises the role of simulation in the new industrial revolution, and its application as a key aspect of making Industry 4.0 a reality - and thus achieving the complete digitisation of manufacturing and business. It presents various perspectives on simulation and demonstrates its applications, from augmented or virtual reality to process engineering, and from quantum computing to intelligent management. Simulation for Industry 4.0 is a guide and milestone for the simulation community, as well as those readers working to achieve the goals of Industry 4.0. The connections between simulation and Industry 4.0 drawn here will be of interest not only to beginners, but also to practitioners and researchers as a point of departure in the subject, and as a guide for new lines of study.

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers presented at the 4th edition of the International Workshop "Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing - SOHOMA'14" organized and hosted on November 5-6, 2014 by the University of Lorraine, France in collaboration with the CIMR Research Centre of the University Politehnica of Bucharest and the TEMPO Laboratory of the University of Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambresis. The book is structured in six parts, each one covering a specific research line which represents a trend in future manufacturing: (1) Holonic and Agent-based Industrial Automation Systems; (2) Service-oriented Management and Control of Manufacturing Systems; (3) Distributed Modelling for Safety and Security in Industrial Systems; (4) Complexity, Big Data and Virtualization in Computing-oriented Manufacturing; (5) Adaptive, Bio-inspired and Self-organizing Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing and (6) Physical Internet Simulation, Modelling and Control. There is a clear orientation of the SOHOMA'14 workshop towards complexity, which is a common view of all six parts. There is need for a framework allowing the development of manufacturing cyber physical systems including capabilities for complex event processing and data analytics which are expected to move the manufacturing domain closer towards cloud manufacturing within contextual enterprises. Recent advances in sensor, communication and intelligent computing technologies made possible the Internet connectivity of the physical world: the Physical Internet, where not only documents and images are created, shared, or modified in the cyberspace, but also the physical resources and products interact over Internet and make decisions based on shared communication.

This book describes different approaches for solving industrial problems like product design, process optimization, quality enhancement, productivity improvement and cost minimization. Several optimization techniques are described. The book covers case studies on the applications of classical as well as evolutionary and swarm optimization tools for solving industrial issues. The content is very helpful for industry personnel, particularly engineers from the Operation, R&D and Quality Assurance sectors, and also the academic researchers of different engineering and/or business administration background.

This book introduces readers to titanium matrix composites (TMCs) with novel network microstructures. The bottleneck problem of extreme brittleness and low strengthening effect surrounding TMCs fabricated by means of powder metallurgy has recently been solved by designing network microstructures, which yield both high strength and superior ductility. As such, network structured TMCs will increasingly offer materials characterized by low weight, high strength, high temperature resistance and superior deformability. The book systematically addresses the design, fabrication, microstructure, properties, modification, and toughening mechanisms of these composites, which will help us find innovative solutions to a range of current and future engineering problems.

This book assesses the state of international manufacturing strategy and clarifies how recent developments, for example regarding configuration, technology, and the environment, are impacting on its content and direction and on its relationship to manufacturing performance. In providing up-to-date coverage of the consequences of such forces and factors for international manufacturing, this book aims to expand the debate concerning international manufacturing strategy and cast light on its current evolution. International manufacturing is operating within a time of great flux. While offshoring of activities has dominated over recent decades, nearshoring and reshoring are increasingly being considered and observed in practice. At the same time, technologies such as 3D-printing are gaining traction and the role of ICT and data analytics is increasingly important in the international manufacturing landscape while digitization becomes more prevalent and the embrace of the Internet of Things (IOT) accelerates. Furthermore, issues related to the environment are figuring more prominently in international manufacturing considerations, and assumptions regarding the long-term cost of energy are being called into question. International manufacturing is also experiencing greater servitization.