Manufacturing Engineering

Introducing a new engineering product or changing an existing model involves making designs, reaching economic decisions, selecting materials, choosing manufacturing processes, and assessing its environmental impact. These activities are interdependent and should not be performed in isolation from each other. This is because the materials and processes used in making the product can have a large influence on its design, cost, and performance in service. For example, making a part from injection-molded plastics instead of pressed sheet metal is expected to involve large changes in design, new production facilities and widely different economic and environmental impact analysis.
Experience has shown that in most industries it is easier to meet the increasing challenge of producing more economic and yet reliable, aesthetically pleasing and environmentally friendly product if a holistic decision making approach of concurrent engineering is adopted in product development. With concurrent engineering, materials and manufacturing processes are considered in the early stages of design and are more precisely defined as the design progresses from the concept to the embodiment and finally the detail stage.
The objective of this book is to illustrate how the activities of design, materials and process selection, and economic and environmental analysis fit together and what sort of tradeoffs can be made in order to arrive at the optimum solution when developing a new product or changing an existing model.

The paper defines and clarifies basic concepts of enterprise architectures. Then an overview on architectures for enterprise integration developed since the middle of the 1980s is presented. The main part of the paper focuses on the recent developments on ...

Metal forming is not only shaping the form of a product, it is also influencing its mechanical and physical properties over its entire volume. Advanced analysis methods recently enable accurate prediction of these properties and allow for setting these properties deterministically during the forming process. Effective measurement methods ensure the setting of these predicted properties. Several real examples demonstrate the impressive achievements and indicate the necessity of a paradigm change in designing products by including manufacturing-induced effects in the initial dimensioning. This paradigm change will lead to lightweight components and serve environmentally benign designs.

Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) are software platforms that support the definition, execution, and tracking of business processes. BPMSs have the ability of logging information about the business processes they support. Proper analysis of BPMS execution logs can yield important knowledge and help organizations improve the quality of their business processes and services to their business partners. This paper presents a set of integrated tools that supports business and IT users in managing process execution quality by providing several features, such as analysis, prediction, monitoring, control, and optimization. We refer to this set of tools as the Business Process Intelligence (BPI) tool suite. Experimental results presented in this paper are very encouraging. We plan to investigate further enhancements on the BPI tools suite, including automated exception prevention, and refinement of process data preparation stage, as well as integrating other data mining techniques.