New World Situation: New Directions in Concurrent Engineering

The proceedings contain papers accepted for the 17th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering, which was held in Cracow, Poland, September 6-10, 2010. Concurrent Engineering (CE) has a history of over twenty years. At first, primary focus was on bringing downstream information as much upstream as possible, by introducing parallel processing of processes, in order to prevent errors at the later stage which would sometimes cause irrevocable damage and to reduce time to market. During the period of more than twenty years, numerous new concepts, methodologies and tools have been developed. During this period the background for engineering/manufacturing has changed extensively. Now, industry has to work with global markets. The globalization brought forth a new network of experts and companies across many different domains and fields in distributed environments. These collaborations integrated with very high level of profesionalism and specialisation, provided the basis for innovations in design and manufacturing and succeeded in creating new products on a global market.

Jerzy Pokojski is the author of IPA - Concepts and Applications in Engineering (Springer) and the host of CE2010 in Poland.   Shuichi Fukuda received his doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tokyo. After working in the Department of Precision Machinery, University of Tokyo, he moved to the Welding Research Institute, Osaka University. Later he worked concurrently at the Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo. He became Full Professor of Systems and Management Engineering at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology and was also Visiting Professor at West Virginia University, Stanford University, Osaka University and Cranfield University. Since his retirement, he has continued in his position as Visiting Professor at Cranfield University, as well as working as Consulting Professor at Stanford University and concurrently as Visiting Professor at the Open University of Japan.   Józef Salwi?ski is Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics at AGH University of Science and Technology. He is the author of various scientific articles and publications concerning machine design.