This Special Issue is related to “Integrated Design of Product and Processes”. The preparation has been done by the four guest editors, Prof. Alain Bernard (France), Dr. Xavier Boucher (France), Prof. Georges Fadel (USA) and Prof. Sandor Vajna (Germany). This issue is an INCOM'06 post-conference publication, based on extended versions of selected papers from the proceedings of the symposium.
The symposium INCOM'2006 was organized by the Division for Industrial Engineering and Computer Sciences (G2I Division) of the Ecole des Mines de Saint Etienne (ENSM.SE), Saint Etienne-France, and was sponsored by IFAC, IFIP, IFORS, IEEE, IMS, EURO, ROADEF, GDR MACS/CNRS (French National Council for Scientific Research) as well as by several European scientific projects and networks.
603 papers were submitted from 57 countries. 783 attendees: 544 academics and 239 industrial representatives, 98 sessions in the final program, 42 industrial exhibitors, 2665 pages of symposium proceedings with 950 authors. For more information see www.emse.fr/incom06.
The papers selected for this issue were chosen mainly from three different tracks, “Integrated Design of Product and Manufacturing Process”, “Integration and Information in Manufacturing” and “Integrated engineering in Industry”, with a total of 12 sessions of three to five papers each.
This Special Issue emphasizes some key elements of the state of the art on engineering design systems, especially considering the products and processes in an overall life cycle management approach. Such integration requires taking into account several dimensions of design and engineering: the product and its manufacturing process, but without forgetting the organizational aspects. The integration of these complementary dimensions through Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is emerging as a topical issue for manufacturing firms. This is a major opportunity to develop integrated tools which cover all the requirements of the entire product life cycle. From a scientific perspective, there is a great need to organize and structure innovative research issues in this emerging field. This Special Issue contributes to this endeavour. Eight papers were carefully selected: they focus on four main topics, as follows.
The first two papers introduce the problem of specifying the formal models necessary to handle an “Integrated Design of Product and Processes”. This has not yet been accomplished in spite of many research efforts.
The second pair of articles tackles the evaluation of the integrated design of product and manufacturing processes. They concern both design solutions and collaborative practices. Performance evaluation is a key issue when the time to market, cost and risk have to be minimized.
The third set of papers is related to the support systems necessary to handle any design activity. They highlight two crucial aspects: (1) the use of standards to favour interoperability and (2) the system architecture for a close-loop integration of PLM information.
Finally, the last contributions deal with two particular issues of PLM. The first focuses on how to formalize end of life and recyclability assessments in order to manage the corresponding information and concepts along the product lifecycle especially during design. The second introduces the necessity of traceability along the whole lifecycle, and proposes some interesting ideas for globally unique product identifiers.
Our aim is to present a vision of the main fields of interest that were discussed during the conference. We would like to thank all the reviewers of this Special Issue: their work has really contributed to the quality of the papers presented. When considering the topic of this issue, it has to be highlighted that each of the eight papers is original and provides some recent and strategic contributions leading to better efficiency and improved robustness for the “Integrated Design of Product and Processes”.