The overall goal of vehicle design is to make a robust and reliable product that meets the demands of the customers and this book treats the topic of analysing and describing customer loads with respect to durability. Guide to Load Analysis for Vehicle and Durability Engineering supplies a variety of methods for load analysis and also explains their proper use in view of the vehicle design process. In Part I, Overview, there are two chapters presenting the scope of the book as well as providing an introduction to the subject. Part II, Methods for Load Analysis, describes useful methods and indicates how and when they should be used. Part III, Load Analysis in view of the Vehicle Design Process, offers strategies for the evaluation of customer loads, in particular characterization of customer populations, which leads to the derivation of design loads, and finally to the verification of systems and components. Key features: Is a comprehensive collection of methods for load analysis, vehicle dynamics and statistics Combines standard load data analysis methods with statistical aspects on deriving test loads from surveys of customer usage Sets the methods used in the framework of system dynamics and response, and derives recommendations for the application of methods in engineering practice Presents a reliability design methodology based on statistical evaluation of component strength and customers loads Includes case studies and illustrative examples that translate the theory into engineering practice Developed in cooperation with six European truck manufacturers (DAF, Daimler, Iveco, MAN, Scania and Volvo) to meet the needs of industry, Guide to Load Analysis for Vehicle and Durability Engineering provides an understanding of the current methods in load analysis and will inspire the incorporation of new techniques in the design and test processes.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2002, held in Stockholm, Sweden in June 2002.The 17 revised full papers and 7 revised short papers presented were carefully selected from 42 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on linguistic aspects of modeling, information retrieval, natural language text understanding, knowledge bases, recognition of information in natural language descriptions, and natural language conversational systems.