Manufacturing industry has been one of the key drivers for recent rapid global economic development. Globalisation of manufacturing industries due to distributed design and labour advantage leads to a drive and thirst for technological advancements and expertise in the fields of advanced design and manufacturing. This development results in many economical benefits to and improvement of quality of life for many people all over the world. This rapid development also creates many opportunities and challenges for both industrialists and academics, as the design requirements and constraints have completely changed in this global design and manufacture environment. Consequently the way to design, manufacture and realise products have changed as well. More and more design and manufacture tasks can now be undertaken within computer environment using simulation and virtual reality technologies. These technological advancements hence support more advanced product development and manufacturing operations in such a global design and manufacturing environment. In this global context and scenario, both industry and the academia have an urgent need to equip themselves with the latest knowledge, technology and methods developed for engineering design and manufacture.

Recent rapid globalisation of manufacturing industries leads to a drive and thirst for rapid advancements in technological development and expertise in the fields of advanced design and manufacturing, especially at their interfaces. This development results in many economical benefits to and improvement of quality of life for many people all over the world. Technically speaking, this rapid development also create many opportunities and challenges for both industrialists and academics, as the design requirements and constraints have completely changed in this global design and manufacture environment. Consequently the way to design, manufacture and realise products have changed as well. The days of designing for a local market and using local suppliers in manufacturing have gone, if enterprises aim to maintain their competitiveness and global expansion leading to further success. In this global context and scenario, both industry and the academia have an urgent need to equip themselves with the latest knowledge, technology and methods developed for engineering design and manufacture. To address this shift in engineering design and manufacture, supported by the European Commission under the Asia Link Programme with a project title FASTAHEAD (A Framework Approach to Strengthening Asian Higher Education in Advanced Design and Manufacture), three key project partners, namely the University of Strathclyde of the United Kingdom, Northwestern Polytechncial University of China, and the Troyes University of Technology of France organised a third international conference.

The changing manufacturing environment requires more responsive and adaptable manufacturing systems. The theme of the 4th International Conference on Changeable, Agile, Reconfigurable and Virtual production (CARV2011) is “Enabling Manufacturing Competitiveness and Economic Sustainability”. Leading edge research and best implementation practices and experiences, which address these important issues and challenges, are presented. The proceedings include advances in manufacturing systems design, planning, evaluation, control and evolving paradigms such as mass customization, personalization, changeability, re-configurability and flexibility. New and important concepts such as the dynamic product families and platforms, co-evolution of products and systems, and methods for enhancing manufacturing systems’ economic sustainability and prolonging their life to produce more than one product generation are treated. Enablers of change in manufacturing systems, production volume and capability scalability and managing the volatility of markets, competition among global enterprises and the increasing complexity of products, manufacturing systems and management strategies are discussed. Industry challenges and future directions for research and development needed to help both practitioners and academicians are presented.

This is an open access book reporting the results of nine years research of the International Research Training Group (IRTG) 2057, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The IRTG is a joint venture between the TU Kaiserslautern, the University of California Berkeley, and University of California Davis. The book is content-driven mainly by two disciplines: engineering and computer science. Through the application of scientific knowledge and advanced computer-based methods in conjunction with physical models on a level unrealized in the past, technologies and methods are promoted, which can be used for planning and optimization of manufacturing systems and processes. As a result, fundamental understanding as well as extensive systems, tools and computational algorithms, which significantly improve the integration of advanced computational methods for solving problems of manufacturing systems and processes will be available. This open access book is of interest to any researcher dealing with process and factory planning in manufacturing, like for cutting and additive manufacturing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2016, held in Hobart, TAS, Australia, in December 2016. The 40 full papers and 18 short papers presented together with 8 invited short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 121 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents and multiagent systems; AI applications and innovations; big data; constraint satisfaction, search and optimisation; knowledge representation and reasoning; machine learning and data mining; social intelligence; and text mining and NLP. The proceedings also contains 2 contributions of the AI 2016 doctoral consortium and 6 contributions of the SMA 2016.

The market demand for skills, knowledge and adaptability have positioned robotics to be an important field in both engineering and science. One of the most highly visible applications of robotics has been the robotic automation of many industrial tasks in factories. In the future, a new era will come in which we will see a greater success for robotics in non-industrial environments. In order to anticipate a wider deployment of intelligent and autonomous robots for tasks such as manufacturing, healthcare, ent- tainment, search and rescue, surveillance, exploration, and security missions, it is essential to push the frontier of robotics into a new dimension, one in which motion and intelligence play equally important roles. The 2010 International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2010) was held in Shanghai, China, November 10–12, 2010. The theme of the c- ference was “Robotics Harmonizing Life,” a theme that reflects the ever-growing interest in research, development and applications in the dynamic and exciting areas of intelligent robotics. These volumes of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Artificial Intel- gence and Lecture Notes in Computer Science contain 140 high-quality papers, which were selected at least for the papers in general sessions, with a 62% acceptance rate Traditionally, ICIRA 2010 holds a series of plenary talks, and we were fortunate to have two such keynote speakers who shared their expertise with us in diverse topic areas spanning the rang of intelligent robotics and application activities.

Residual Stress, Thermomechanics & Infrared Imaging and Inverse Problems, Volume 6 of the Proceedings of the 2019 SEM Annual Conference & Exposition on Experimental and Applied Mechanics, the sixth volume of six from the Conference, brings together contributions to this important area of research and engineering. The collection presents early findings and case studies on a wide range of areas, including: Test Design and Inverse Method Algorithms Inverse Problems: Virtual Fields Method Residual Stresses: Measurement, Uncertainty & Validation Residual Stresses: Eigenvalues, Modeling, & Crack Growth Material Characterizations Using Thermography Fatigue, Damage & Fracture Evaluation Using Infrared Thermography