According to the Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC) at West Virginia University, "the concurrent engineering (CE) is a rapid simultaneous approach where research and development, design, manufacturing and support are carried out in parallel". The mission of concurrent engineering is to reduce time to market, improve total quality and lower cost for products or systems developed and supported by large organizations. The purpose of the concurrent design methodology is to let the designer know the consequences of his design decisions in the manufacturing and assembly stages as well as in subsequent operations. Design for manufacture and assembly, design for reliability and testability, CAD/CAM/CAE, knowledge based systems, cost analysis and advanced material technology are the major constituents of concurrent engineering. The need for concurrent engineering can be justified from the fact that in every production cycle, the design phase approximately takes 5 to 10% of the total cycle, but overall it influences 80% of the production cycle. This volume contains articles from a wide spectrum dealing with concepts of concurrent engineering. The importance of the knowledge-based systems in the CE environment is significant as they provide the common platform to achieve the same level of expertise to the designers and manufacturers throughout the organization for the specific task. Their role in "do it right the first time" is very important in providing aid to the designers and manufacturers to optimize the design and manufacturing setups for a cost effectiveness and reduced production time.

A review of the development of object oriented modelling and of the competitive advantages and pitfalls. This work reports on the computer visualisation for use in project design and planning, and examines the process of using a computer to manage the interaction between professional consultants and the project.

Topics covered include: design technologies and applications; FE simulation for concurrent design and manufacture; methodologies; knowledge engineering and management; CE within virtual enterprises; and CE - the future.

This volume is about automation - automation in design, automation in manufacturing, and automation in production. Automation is essen tial for increased productivity of quality products at reduced costs. That even partial or piecemeal automation of a production facility can deliver dramatic improvements in productivity has been amply demon strated in many a real-life situation. Hence, currently, great ef forts are being devoted to research and development of general as well special methodologies of and tools for automation. This volume re ports on some of these methodologies and tools. In general terms, methodologies for automation can be divided into two groups. There are situations where a process, whether open-loop or closed-loop, is fairly clearly understood. In such a situation, it is possible to create a mathematical model and to prescribe a mathe matical procedure to optimize the output. If such mathematical models and procedures are computationally tractable, we call the correspond ing automation - algorithmic or parametric programming. There is, however, a second set of situations which include process es that are not well understood and the available mathematical models are only approximate and discrete. While there are others for which mathematical procedures are so complex and disjoint that they are computationally intractable. These are the situations for which heuristics are quite suitable for automation. We choose to call such automation, knowledge-based automation or heuristic programming.

Currently, most of the textile industry and textile institutions are located in South Asia. The textile industry leads to the development of clothing from fibres, yarns, and fabrics. The industry is growing in this area as it has already been shifted from Europe and is being shifting from China. As the textile industry is growing, many new textile intuitions are being established to provide for quality textile education. This introductory level textbooks is geared towars them. This book will provide all necessary information from fibres to fabrics and their conversion to clothing. The importance of textiles in the current era along with the raw materials needed for the textiles are given. After that, it is explained how the yarn is made from fibres. Then the fabrics manufacturing, the printing and dyeing of textiles and the conversion of fabrics into the garments is discussed. Also, the testing of fibres, yarns and fabrics along with the description of technical textiles is mentioned. This book is beneficial for all readers who are going to start their career in textiles or are going to start the engineering degree in textiles. The present book is designed for the first year students (especially for the National Textile University Faisalabad) of textile engineering.

Presents state-of-the-art research and case studies from over 150 Design & Manufacturing professionals across the globe in the areas of CAD/CAM; Product Design; Rapid Prototyping and Tooling; Manufacturing Processes; Micromachining and Miniaturisation; Mechanism and Robotics; Artificial Intelligence; and Material Handling Systems.

Records publications acquired from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, by the U.S. Library of Congress Offices in New Delhi, India, and Karachi, Pakistan.

This volume contains papers selected for presentation at the Seventh International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS '93), held at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, Trondheim, Norway, in June 1993. The volume includes six invited talks and 43 contributed papers organized under the following headings: logic for artificial intelligence, expert systems, intelligent databases, approximate reasoning, constraint programming, learning and adaptive systems, methodologies, knowledge representation, and manufacturing. Theinvited talks are: "On extended disjunctive logic programs" (J. Minker, C. Ruiz), "Towards intelligent databases" (F. Bry), "Methodologies for knowledge-based software engineering" (M. Lowry), "Modelling of industrial systems" (L. Ljung), "The many faces of inductive logic programming" (L. De Raedt, N. Lavrac), and "Systematic assessment of temporal reasoning methods for use in autonomous agents" (E. Sandewall).