Cooperative working environments and their development are becoming increasingly important and ever more frequent in different industrial sectors and this book provides a scientific approach for managing Team Engineering. Meta-cognitive knowledge and networks are identified as the key resources enabling engineering teams to work effectively and to reduce engineering time and this book illustrates how computer support can aid cooperative work within the context of practical methodologies and examples. The fields covered in the book include: State-of-the-art research in cooperative learning tools; Practical examples and methodologies illustrating the implementation of cooperative networks; and An interdisciplinary approach to team engineering. This valuable new book is sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and will be essential reading for researchers, engineers, technical managers involved in the development of advanced applications for engineering and manufacturing, and software design and engineering.

This book is a collection of papers presented at the 7th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering (CE): Research and Applications. The papers deal with different topics providing information on information modelling, CE in virtual environment, and standards in CE.

"This book summarizes the state of the art in the emergent field of Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems, showing researchers, managers, engineers and information technology specialists how to develop and implement effective CEMIS"--Provided by publisher.

Modem manufacturing systems involve many processes and operations that can be monitored and controlled at several levels of intelligence. At the highest level there is a computer that supervises the various manufacturing functions, whereas at the lowest level there are stand alone computer controlled systems of manufacturing processes and robotic cells. Until recenty computer-aided manufacturing systems constituted isolated "islands" of automation, each oriented to a particular application, but present day systems offer integrated approaches to manufacturing and enterprise operations. These modem systems, known as computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) systems, can easily meet the current performance and manufacturing competitiveness requirements under strong environmental changes. CIM systems are much of a challenge, and imply a systemic approach to the design and operation of a manufacturing enterprise. Actualy, a CIM system must take into account in a unified way the following three views : the user view, the technology view, and the enterprise view. This means that CIM includes both the engineering and enterprise planning and control activities, as well as the information flow activities across all the stages of the system.

This book brings together approaches from different subfields of artificial intelligence as well as adjoint disciplines in order to characterize a "computational model" of conflicts.

IMPROVE stands for "Information Technology Support for Collaborative and Distributed Design Processes in Chemical Engineering" and is a large joint project of research institutions at RWTH Aachen University. This volume summarizes the results after 9 years of cooperative research work. The focus of IMRPOVE is on understanding, formalizing, evaluating, and, consequently, improving design processes in chemical engineering. In particular, IMPROVE focuses on conceptual design and basic engineering, where the fundamental decisions concerning the design or redesign of a chemical plant are undertaken. Design processes are analyzed and evaluated in collaboration with industrial partners.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2010, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in August/September, 2010.

Design is a fundamental creative human activity. This certainly applies to the design of artefacts, the realisation of which has to meet many constraints and ever raising criteria. The world in which we live today, is enormously influenced by the human race. Over the last century, these artefacts have dramatically changed the living conditions of humans. The present wealth in very large parts of the world, depends on it. All the ideas for better and new artefacts brought forward by humans have gone through the minds of designers, who have turned them into feasible concepts and subsequently transformed them into realistic product models. The designers have been, still are, and will remain the leading 'change agents' in the physical world. Manufacturability of artefacts has always played a significant role in design. In pre industrial manufacturing, the blacksmith held the many design and realisation aspects of a product in one hand. The synthesis of the design and manufacturing aspects took, almost implicitly, place in the head of the man. All the knowledge and the skills were stored in one person. Education and training took place along the line of many years of apprenticeship. When the production volumes increased, -'assembling to measure' was no longer tolerated and production efficiency became essential - design, process planning, production planning and fabrication became separated concerns. The designers created their own world, separated from the production world. They argued that restrictions in the freedom of designing would badly influence their creativity in design.

The 6th InternationalConference on Cooperative Design, Visualization and - gineering CDVE 2009 was held in central Europe - Luxembourg. Participants from ?ve continents came together to celebrate this annual event. Thepaperspublishedintheconferenceinthisvolumere?ectthenewprogress in the following aspect. Research in developing cooperative applications is currently focusing on two directions. One is the cooperation in the software development process and the other is the variety of the targeted cooperative software products. Many papers address how to facilitate cooperation in the software engineering process p- ticularly global software engineering. The importance of sharing information in cooperation is emphasized by the authors. For example, papers that addressed the developmentof sharing mental models, tools for easilyshared projects,sh- ing links for cross-media information spaces, sharing resources and transfer of knowledge among team members etc. have attracted special attention. Many papers presented in this volume are the research results of tackling problems in developing a great variety of cooperative software products. The targeted systems are cooperative support for music creation, cooperative process m- agement systems, cooperative visualization systems for geographic information, cooperative cultural information sharing platforms, cooperative reasoning s- tems, cooperative sensor networks for environment monitoring, remote coop- ative video vehicle monitoring systems etc. Another aspect of the papers in this volume is dealing with the problems in ?ner phases in the cooperative product production life cycle. The topics addressed range from partner selection for - operation at the beginning, requirement gathering, requirement negotiation, to cooperativedesign, production to cooperative testing, and ?nally to cooperative system operation.

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.