Methods and Tools for Co-operative and Integrated Design

The book focuses on methods and tools for collaborative and integrated design. It presents recent advances in the field and contains 40 selected papers among all presented at the CIRP Design Seminar held in Grenoble, France, in May 2003. Design has become the key industrial stage for innovative products in a globalized market. New industrial organizations and philosophical trends raised integration and collaboration in design to success factors for product design methods. The book is divided in 3 sections: - Two keynotes giving the industrial and European Community vision respectively of co-operation and integration in product design. - Integrated design tools coping with tools for the support of the integration of the disciplines involved in the design process, and for the control of the design process in integrated organizations. - Collaborative design tools emphasizing new architectures of collaborative design systems, the understanding of collaborative design activity and tools supporting engineering collaboration. The present book is of interest to engineers, researchers, academic staff, and postgraduate students interested in integrated design and manufacturing, technology ma