Collaborative Design and Planning for Digital Manufacturing

Collaborative design has attracted much attention among researchers in recent years. With increasingly decentralized manufacturing systems and processes, more collaborative approaches are needed to support distributed manufacturing operations.

Collaborative Design and Planning for Digital Manufacturing presents a focused collection of quality chapters on the state-of-the-art research efforts in the area of collaboratives design and planning as well as their practical applications towards digital manufacturing.

A range of innovative methods and collaborative systems is analysed, examining the emerging technologies and their practical applications that contribute directly to digital manufacturing. Each chapter of the book addresses a specific new approach and offers practical solutions for real scenarios of collaborative design and planning in digital manufacturing. The authors discuss solutions in a number of areas, including:

cross-discipline information sharing;

workflow management;

integration of suppliers into a process chain; and

performance measures of distributed manufacturing systems.

Collaborative Design and Planning for Digital Manufacturing provides both a broad-based review of the key areas of research in digital manufacturing, and an in depth treatment of particular methodologies and systems, from collaborative design to distributed planning, monitoring and control. Recent development and innovations in this area provide a pool of focused research efforts, relevant to a wide readership from academic researchers to practising engineers.

Collaborative design has attracted much attention in the research community in recent years. With increasingly decentralized manufacturing systems and processes, more collaborative approaches and systems are needed to support distributed manufacturing operations. "Collaborative Design and Planning for Digital Manufacturing" presents a focused collection of quality chapters on the state-of-the-art research efforts in the area of collaborative design and planning, as well as their practical applications towards digital manufacturing.

"Collaborative Design and Planning for Digital Manufacturing" provides both a broad-based review of the key areas of research in digital manufacturing, and an in-depth treatment of particular methodologies and systems, from collaborative design to distributed planning, monitoring and control. Recent development and innovations in this area provide a pool of focused research efforts, relevant to a wide readership from academic researchers to practicing engineers.

Lihui Wang is a professor of virtual manufacturing at the University of Skövde’s Virtual Systems Research Centre in Sweden. He was previously a senior research scientist at the Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Institute, National Research Council of Canada. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at the University of Western Ontario, and a registered professional engineer in Canada.

His research interests and responsibilities are in web-based and sensor-driven real-time monitoring and control, distributed machining process planning, adaptive assembly planning, collaborative design, supply chain management, as well as intelligent and adaptive manufacturing systems.

Andrew Y.C. Nee is a professor of manufacturing engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Director of the Office of Research at the NUS. His research interests are computer applications for tool, die, fixture design and planning; intelligent and distributed manufacturing systems; and, virtual and augmented reality applications in manufacturing. He is an active member of CIRP and an elected Fellow of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.