BASYS conferences were initially organized to promote the development of balanced automation systems. The first BASYS conference was successfully launched in Victoria, Brazil, in 1995. BASYS'06 is the 7th edition in this series. This book comprises three invited keynote papers and forty-nine regular papers accepted for presentation at the conference. All together, these papers will make significant contributions to the literature of Intelligent Technology for Balanced Manufacturing Systems.

The process planning and scheduling issues of intelligent and distributed manufacturing are crucial nowadays due to the need for enterprises to be adaptive, re-configurable, collaborative and flexible enough to support the emergence of worldwide competition and dynamic and mass-customized markets. With this increasing dynamism of decentralized manufacturing systems and processes, more effective and efficient decision-making techniques are needed.

Unlike traditional methodologies for rather centralized and static process planning and scheduling, Process Planning and Scheduling for Distributed Manufacturing is the first book to focus on emerging technologies for distributed intelligent decision-making in process planning and dynamic scheduling. As a collection of chapters on state-of-the art research in this area; this book consists of two major sections: the first section presents a review of several key areas of research in process planning and scheduling (e.g. adaptive process planning, dynamic scheduling, and process planning and scheduling integration), and the second section presents an in-depth treatment of particular techniques, from agent-based resource scheduling to function block enabled process planning and execution control. Each chapter addresses a specific problem domain and offers practical solutions to solve the problem.

Given the essential role manufacturing plays in the economic development of all industrial nations, Process Planning and Scheduling for Distributed Manufacturing will be of interest to academic researchers, practising engineers and graduate students for whom it will provide a better understanding of the present state and future trends ofresearch in this important area.

BASYS conferences were initially organized to promote the development of balanced automation systems. The first BASYS conference was successfully launched in Victoria, Brazil, in 1995. BASYS'06 is the 7th edition in this series. This book comprises three invited keynote papers and forty-nine regular papers accepted for presentation at the conference. All together, these papers will make significant contributions to the literature of Intelligent Technology for Balanced Manufacturing Systems.

This is the first book to focus on emerging technologies for distributed intelligent decision-making in process planning and dynamic scheduling. It has two sections: a review of several key areas of research, and an in-depth treatment of particular techniques. Each chapter addresses a specific problem domain and offers practical solutions to solve it. The book provides a better understanding of the present state and future trends of research in this area.

Design of complex artifacts and systems requires the cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams using multiple sophisticated commercial and non-commercial engine- ing tools such as CAD tools, modeling, simulation and optimization software, en- neering databases, and knowledge-based systems. Individuals or individual groups of multidisciplinary design teams usually work in parallel and independently with various engineering tools, which are located on different sites, often for quite a long period of time. At any moment, individual members may be working on different versions of a design or viewing the design from various perspectives, at different levels of details. In order to meet these requirements, it is necessary to have efficient comput- supported collaborative design systems. These systems should not only automate in- vidual tasks, in the manner of traditional computer-aided engineering tools, but also enable individual members to share information, collaborate, and coordinate their activities within the context of a design project. Based on close international collaboration between the University of Technology of Compiegne in France and the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Ac- emy of Sciences in the early 1990s, a series of international workshops on CSCW in Design started in 1996. In order to facilitate the organization of these workshops, an International Working Group on CSCW in Design (CSCWD) was established and an International Steering Committee was formed in 1998. The series was converted to int- national conferences in 2000 building on the success of the four previous workshops."

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2006, held in Nanjing, China in May 2006.

The 76 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from about 600 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. They contain expanded versions of the papers presented at the conference and are organized in topical sections on CSCW techniques and methods, collaborative design, collaborative manufacturing and enterprise collaboration, design methods and tools, agents and multi-agent systems, Web services, semantic Web, and grid computing, knowledge management, security and privacy in CSCW systems, workflow management, and e-learning.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2005, held in Coventry, UK, in May 2005.

The 65 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions during at least two rounds of reviewing and improvement. They contain expanded versions of the papers presented at the conference and are organized in topical sections on CSCW techniques and methods, Grids and Web services, agents and multi-agent systems, ontology and knowledge management, collaborative design and manufacturing, enterprise collaboration, workflows, and other related approaches and applications.

The design of complex artifacts and systems requires the cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams using multiple commercial and non-commercial engineering tools such as CAD tools, modeling, simulation and optimization software, engineering databases, and knowledge-based systems. Individuals or individual groups of multidisciplinary design teams usually work in parallel and separately with various engineering tools, which are located on different sites, often for quite a long time. At any moment, individual members may be working on different versions of a design or viewing the design from various perspectives, at different levels of detail. In order to meet these requirements, it is necessary to have effective and efficient collaborative design environments. These environments should not only automate individual tasks, in the manner of traditional computer-aided engineering tools, but also enable individual members to share information, collaborate and coordinate their activities within the context of a design project. CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) in design is concerned with the development of such environments.

Contents:
Part One: Introduction Chapter 1: General Introduction. 1.1 Motivation. 1.2 Book Organization. 1.3 How To Use This Book. Chapter 2: Collaborative Design and Manufacturing. 2.1 Introduction. 2.2 Engineering Design. 2.3 Advanced Manufacturing Systems. 2.4 Next Generation Collaborative Design and Manufacturing Systems. Chapter 3: DAI and Agents. 3.1 Classic AI and DAI. 3.2 Research Themes in DAI. 3.3 Models of DAI Systems. 3.4 Objects vs. Agents. 3.5 Different Types of Agents. 3.6. Why Agents for Collaborative Design and Manufacturing. Part Two: Important Issues Chapter 4: Knowledge Representation in Agent-Based Concurrent Design and Manufacturing Systems. 4.1 Introduction 4.2 What needs to be Represented. 4.3 How to Represent Knowledge in Agent-Based Systems. 4.4 Research Literature and Further References. Chapter 5: Learning in Agent-Based Concurrent Design and Manufacturing Systems. 5.1 Introdution. 5.2 Why to Learn. 5.3 Single-Agent Learning or Multi-Agent Learning. 5.4 When to Learn. 5.5 Where to Learn. 5.6 What is to be Learned. 5.7 How to Learn. 5.8 Examples. 5.9 Research Literature and Additional References. Chapter 6: Agent Structures. 6.1 Introduction. 6.2 Desirable characteristics of an agent. 6.3 Essential Modules (Components) for agents. 6.4 Different Approaches. 6.5 Comparison of Different Approaches. 6.6 Research Literature and further References. Chapter 7: Multi-Agent System Architectures. 7.1 Introduction. 7.2 Organization and System Architectures. 7.3 Different Approaches. 7.4 Select a suitable system architecture for a specific application. 7.5 Research Literature and Additional Readings. Chapter 8: Communication, Cooperation and Coordination. 8.1 Introduction. 8.2 Communication. 8.3 Coordination. 8.4 Cooperation. 8.5 Coordination, Cooperation and Communication. 8.6 Research Literature and Further References. Chapter 9: Collaboration, Task Decompsition and Allocation. 9.1 Introduction. 9.2 Different Approaches for Task Decomposition and Allocation. 9.3 Coordinated Task Allocation by Mediation. 9.4 Distributed Task Allocation. 9.5 Task Decomposition in MetaMorph: an Example. 9.6 Research Literature and Additional References. Chapter 10: Negotiation and Conflict Resolution. 10.1 Introduction. 10.2 Classification of Negotiation Categories. 103. Negotiation Protocols. 10.4 Negotiation Strategies. 10.5 Negotiation for Conflict Resolution. 10.6 Examples in Concurrent Design and Manufacturing. 10.7 Research Literature and Additional Information. Chapter 11: Ontology Problems. 11.1 Introduction. 11.2 What is Ontology? 11.3 Ontology and Knowledge Sharing. 11.4 Ontology Problems in Concurrent Design and Manufacturing. 11.5 Related concepts, Theories and Methods. 11.6 Ontolingua: A System for Managing Portable Ontologies. 11.7 Research Literature and Additional References. Chapter 12: Other Important Issues. 12.1 Introduction. 12.2 Agent Encapsulation. 12.3 Human machine integration (human participation). 12.4 System dynamics. 12.5. Design and manufacturability assessments. 12.6 Integration of manufacturing Planning, Scheduling and Execution. 12.7 Distributed Dynamic Scheduling. 12.8 Enterprise Integration and Supply Chain Management. 12.9 Legacy problem. 12.10 External interfaces. Part Three: Agent-Based Systems for Engineering Design & Manufacturing Chapter 13: Agent-Based Engineering Design Systems. 13.1 Introduction. 13.2 PACT (PACE) 13.3 SHARE (DSC) 13.4 First-Link, Next-Link and Process Link. 13.5 DIDE. 13.6 SiFAs. 13.7 RAPPID. 13.8 Other projects. 13.9 Summary. Chapter 14: Agent-Based manufacturing Planning, Scheduling and Control. 14.1 Introduction. 14.2 MetaMorph. 14.3 AARIA. 14.4 ADDYMS. 14.5 Other Projects. 14.6 Summary. Chapter 15: Enterprise Integration and Supply Chain Management. 15.1 Introduction. 15.2 ISCM. 15.3 CIIMPLEX. 15.4 MetaMorph II. 15.5 AIMS. 15.6 Other Projects. 15.7 Summary. Part Five: Developing Agent-Based Design and Manufacturing Systems Chapter 16: Methodology, Standards, Tools, Languages, and Frameworks. 16.1 Introduction. 16.2 Tools and Framework. 16.3 Methodology, Languages, and Standards. 16.4 Further references. Chapter 17: Building Agent-Based Design and Manufacturing Systems. 17.1 Introduction. 17.2 Selecting or developing an agent architecture. 17.3 Selecting an approach for agent organization. 17.4 Selecting or developing protocols for inter-agent communication. 17.5 Developing mechanisms for cooperation, coordination and negotiation. 17.6 Selecting platforms, tools and languages. 17.7 Agent-Oriented Design and Analysis. 17.8 Simulation and Implementation. 17.9 Testing, Debugging and Evaluation.