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.

In the light of the challenges that face today's organizations, there is a grow ing recognition that future market success and long term' survival of enter prises will increasingly depend upon the effective usage of information technology. Of late, a new generation of terminology has emerged to describe enterprises. This terminology draws heavily upon the virtual concep- virtual reality, virtual organization, virtual (working) environment, and indeed virtual product. However, developing computerized organisations for the 21st century demands serious thought with regard to the judicious integration of organizational theory, design and practice with research tools and methods from within information processing technology. Within this book, we approach this aim from the perspective of a radically decentralized (possibly virtual) enterprise. We assume that organizations are becoming increasingly process-orientated, rather than adhering to the former more traditional organizational structures based upon task oriented models. This approach has proved illuminating in that, due to the inherent autonomy of organizational subunits any approach to coordinating decentralized activ ities (including workflows and business processes) necessitates a cooperative style of problem solving. This book introduces the reader to a stimulating new field of interdiscipli nary research in cooperative problem solving. In Chapter 1 Kim presents a view of three central discip14tes, namely those of Organizational Theory, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI). The applications given here demonstrate how future enterprises will benefit from recent advances in the technological arena of cooperative knowledge processing.

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.

Summarizes the work of IMPROVE (Information Technology Support for Collaborative and Distributed Design Processes in Chemical Engineering), a joint project of research institutions at RWTH Aachen University.

As the complexity of design, visualization and engineering increases rapidly, single-user's e?ort is no longer enough to accomplishever-growingrequirements. Group e?ort becomes essential. There are many industrial areas that demand strong CDVE support such as mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, architecture design, engineering and building construction (AEC), etc. There are numerousother application areaswhere cooperativeand concurrent working is becoming popular, such as entertainment program development, networked gaming, simulation, collaborative learning, etc. Successful cooperative design, visualization and engineering highly depend on the advances in fundamental research areas such as concurrent proce- ing, middleware, agent-based methods, design patterns, distributed systems, databases, transport protocols in network communication, human machine - teraction, group behavior ..., just to name a few. There is a very tight re- tionship between cooperative design, visualization and engineering. Cooperative design will become impossible without cooperative visualization while coop- ative engineering processes would not be complete without cooperative design and visualization. From my research experience in the?eld since 1996 in the Spanish National R & D Project CICYT TEL 96-0544, 3D Cooperative Design System (Sistemas Cooperativos de Diseo en 3D), up to the European Esprit (IST) Project No.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering, CDVE 2005, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in September 2005. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from over 100 submissions. The papers cover all current issues in cooperative design, visualization, engineering, and other cooperative applications. Topics addressed are such as constraint maintenance, decision support, and security enforcement for CDVE. Case studies and application specific developments are among the cooperative visualization papers. Along the line of cooperative engineering, knowledge management, reconfigurability, and concurrency control are major issues addressed.

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.