This text book is for senior and graduate engineers. It should be used for senior and advanced design classes. It follows Suh's other book with OUP, Principles of Design (OUP, 1990). Suh has proposed axiomatic design as a means of creating the science base for the field of design.

Nam P. Suh focussed his axiomatic design theories on methods to understand and deal with complexity. Suh is a well-respected designer and researcher in the fields of manufacturing and composite materials. He is best known for his systems that aim to speed up and simplify the process of design for manufacturing. The 'axioms' in axiomatic design refer to a process to help engineers reduce design specifications down to their simplest components, so that the engineers can produce the simplest possible solution to a problem. Complexity, besides being a key area of burgeoning research in disciplines interested in complex systems and chaos theory (like computer science and physics), is a complicating factor in engineering design that many engineers find difficult to overcome. Suh's multidisciplinary exploration of complex systems is meant to eliminate much of the confusion and allow engineers to accommodate complexity within simple, elegant design solutions.

This book provides a synthesis of recent developments in Axiomatic Design theory and its application in large complex systems. Introductory chapters provide concise tutorial materials for graduate students and new practitioners, presenting the fundamentals of Axiomatic Design and relating its key concepts to those of model-based systems engineering. A mathematical exposition of design axioms is also provided. The main body of the book, which represents a concentrated treatment of several applications, is divided into three parts covering work on: complex products; buildings; and manufacturing systems. The book shows how design work in these areas can benefit from the scientific and systematic underpinning provided by Axiomatic Design, and in so doing effectively combines the state of the art in design research with practice. All contributions were written by an international group of leading proponents of Axiomatic Design. The book concludes with a call to action motivating further research into the engineering design of large complex systems.

The idea that materials can be designed to satisfy specific performance requirements is relatively new. With high-performance composites, however, the entire process of designing and fabricating a part can be worked out before manufacturing. The purpose of this book is to present an integrated approach to the design and manufacturing of products from advanced composites. It shows how the basic behavior of composites and their constitutive relationships can be used during the design stage, which minimizes the complexity of manufacturing composite parts and reduces the repetitive "design-build-test" cycle. Designing it right the first time is going to determine the competitiveness of a company, the reliability of the part, the robustness of fabrication processes, and ultimately, the cost and development time of composite parts. Most of all, it should expand the use of advanced composite parts in fields that use composites only to a limited extent at this time. To achieve these goals, this book presents the design and fabrication of novel composite parts made for machine tools and other applications like robots and automobiles.
This book is suitable as a textbook for graduate courses in the design and fabrication of composites. It will also be of interest to practicing engineers learning about composites and axiomatic design.
A CD-ROM is included in every copy of the book, containing Axiomatic CLPT software. This program, developed by the authors, will assist readers in calculating material properties from the microstructure of the composite.
This book is part of the Oxford Series on Advanced Manufacturing.

This book provides a synthesis of recent developments in Axiomatic Design theory and its application in large complex systems. Introductory chapters provide concise tutorial materials for graduate students and new practitioners, presenting the fundamentals of Axiomatic Design and relating its key concepts to those of model-based systems engineering. A mathematical exposition of design axioms is also provided. The main body of the book, which represents a concentrated treatment of several applications, is divided into three parts covering work on: complex products; buildings; and manufacturing systems. The book shows how design work in these areas can benefit from the scientific and systematic underpinning provided by Axiomatic Design, and in so doing effectively combines the state of the art in design research with practice. All contributions were written by an international group of leading proponents of Axiomatic Design. The book concludes with a call to action motivating further research into the engineering design of large complex systems.

This book presents the principles of design and constitutes an exposition of the design axioms and their applications. The work is based on extensive experience at MIT's Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity, where axiomatics is a major programme. It aims to bring a scientific approach to the decision making process related to manufacture - an approach which facilitates rational design of processes, products, and optimization of manufacturing systems.