The Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture conference series has become a well-established, largely application-oriented meeting recognised by several UK Engineering Institutions and the International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computing. The main theme of the series relates to the integration of evolutionary and adaptive computing technologies with design and manufacturing processes whilst also taking into account complementary advanced computing technologies. Evolutionary and adaptive computing techniques continue to increase their penetration of industrial and commercial practice as awareness of their powerful search, exploration and optimisation capabilities becomes ever more prevalent, and increasing desk-top computational capability renders stochastic population-based search a far more viable proposition. There has been a significant increase in the development and integration of commercial software tools utilising adaptive computing technologies and the emergence of related commercial research and consultancy organisations supporting the introduction of best practice in terms of industrial utilisation. The book is comprised of selected papers that cover a diverse set of industrial application areas including engineering design and design environments and manufacturing process design, scheduling and control. Various aspects of search, exploration and optimisation are investigated in the context of integration with industrial processes including multi-objective and constraint satisfaction, development and utilization of meta-models, algorithm and strategy development and human-centric evolutionary approaches. The role of agent-based and neural net technologies in terms of supporting search processes and providing an alternative simulation environment is also explored. This collection of papers will be of particular interest to both industrial researchers and practitioners in addition to the academic research communities across engineering, operational research and computer science.

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

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