The globalisation of markets and the expansion of product responsibility into the entire product life cycle lead to an increasing competitive situation for nationally and internationally operating companies. Therefore, to win this competition the use of the most effective and efficient resources regarding the whole product life cycle is necessary. Since these resources are globally distributed the different tasks both within a phase of product life cycle and those spread over different phases are distributed as well. The global interference of these tasks requires a close multilateral co-operation of the companies concerned. Current information- and communication technologies and modern management concepts offer high potentials to meet these requirements. The international seminar of CIRP on Life Cycle Engineering titled "Life Cycle Networks" was a forum for the presentation and discussion of current research work and recent advancements on these strategic issues for current and future engineering. Complex requirements and innovative solutions to support and realise Life Cycle Networks has been revealed and summerised. The employment of information technology to support both specific phases of product life cycle and holistic approaches will be the main focus. This volume contains the papers presented at the seminar which provide opportunities to identify the state-of-the-art and address future needs. The parts in this volume correspond to the sessions of the seminar and are presented under the following headings: Life Cycle Management; Life Cycle Design; Design for Environment; Design for Recycling; Life Cycle Assessment; Disassembly; IT-Networks.

Bridge Maintenance, Safety, Management, Life-Cycle Sustainability and Innovations contains lectures and papers presented at the Tenth International Conference on Bridge Maintenance, Safety and Management (IABMAS 2020), held in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, April 11–15, 2021. This volume consists of a book of extended abstracts and a USB card containing the full papers of 571 contributions presented at IABMAS 2020, including the T.Y. Lin Lecture, 9 Keynote Lectures, and 561 technical papers from 40 countries. The contributions presented at IABMAS 2020 deal with the state of the art as well as emerging concepts and innovative applications related to the main aspects of maintenance, safety, management, life-cycle sustainability and technological innovations of bridges. Major topics include: advanced bridge design, construction and maintenance approaches, safety, reliability and risk evaluation, life-cycle management, life-cycle sustainability, standardization, analytical models, bridge management systems, service life prediction, maintenance and management strategies, structural health monitoring, non-destructive testing and field testing, safety, resilience, robustness and redundancy, durability enhancement, repair and rehabilitation, fatigue and corrosion, extreme loads, and application of information and computer technology and artificial intelligence for bridges, among others. This volume provides both an up-to-date overview of the field of bridge engineering and significant contributions to the process of making more rational decisions on maintenance, safety, management, life-cycle sustainability and technological innovations of bridges for the purpose of enhancing the welfare of society. The Editors hope that these Proceedings will serve as a valuable reference to all concerned with bridge structure and infrastructure systems, including engineers, researchers, academics and students from all areas of bridge engineering.

Environmental Life Cycle Assessment is a pivotal guide to identifying environmental problems and reducing related impacts for companies and organizations in need of life cycle assessment (LCA). LCA, a unique sustainability tool, provides a framework that addresses a growing demand for practical technological solutions. Detailing each phase of the LCA methodology, this textbook covers the historical development of LCA, presents the general principles and characteristics of LCA, and outlines the corresponding standards for good practice determined by the International Organization for Standardization. It also explains how to identify the critical aspects of an LCA, provides detailed examples of LCA analysis and applications, and includes illustrated problems and solutions with concrete examples from water management, electronics, packaging, automotive, and other industries. In addition, readers will learn how to: Use consistent criteria to realize and evaluate an LCA independently of individual interests Understand the LCA methodology and become familiar with existing databases and methods based on the latest results of international research Analyze and critique a completed LCA Apply LCA methodology to simple case studies Geared toward graduate and undergraduate students studying environmental science and industrial ecology, as well as practicing environmental engineers, and sustainability professionals who want to teach themselves LCA good practices, Environmental Life Cycle Assessment demonstrates how to conduct environmental assessments for products throughout their life cycles. It presents existing methods and recent developments in the growing field of LCA and systematically covers goal and system definition, life cycle inventory, life cycle impact assessment, and interpretation.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an established methodology used to quantify the environmental impacts of products, processes and services. Circular economy (CE) thinking is conceptual way of considering the impacts of consuming resources. By taking a closed loop approach, CE provides a framework for influencing behaviours and practices to minimise this impact. Development of the circular economy is a crucial component in the progression towards future sustainability. This book provides a robust systematic approach to the circular economy concept, using the established methodology of LCA. Including chapters on circular economic thinking, the use of LCA as a metric and linking LCA to the wider circular economy, this book utilises case studies to illustrate the approaches to LCA. With contributions from researchers worldwide, Life Cycle Assessment provides a practical, global guide for those who wish to use LCA as a research tool or to inform policy, process, and product improvement.

This practical new resource gives you a comprehensive understanding of the design and deployment of transmission networks for wireless applications. From principles and design, to equipment procurement, project management, testing, and operation, it's a practical, hands-on engineering guide with numerous real-life examples of turn-key operations in the wireless networking industry. This book, written for both technical and non-technical professionals, helps you deal with the costs and difficulties involved in setting up the local access with technologies that are still in the evolutionary stage. Issues involved in the deployment of various transmission technologies, and their impact on the overall wireless network topology are discussed. Strategy and approach to transmission network planning, design and deployment are explored. The book offers practical guidelines and advice derived from the author's own experience on projects worldwide. You gain a solid grounding in third generation wireless networks with increased capacity requirements, while learning all about packet data architecture, and how it will impact future transmission network design and deployment.

This volume provides the audience with an updated, in-depth and highly coherent material on the conceptually appealing and practically sound information technology of Computational Intelligence applied to the analysis, synthesis and evaluation of social networks. The volume involves studies devoted to key issues of social networks including community structure detection in networks, online social networks, knowledge growth and evaluation, and diversity of collaboration mechanisms. The book engages a wealth of methods of Computational Intelligence along with well-known techniques of linear programming, Formal Concept Analysis, machine learning, and agent modeling. Human-centricity is of paramount relevance and this facet manifests in many ways including personalized semantics, trust metric, and personal knowledge management; just to highlight a few of these aspects. The contributors to this volume report on various essential applications including cyber attacks detection, building enterprise social networks, business intelligence and forming collaboration schemes. Given the subject area, this book is aimed at a broad audience of researchers and practitioners. Owing to the nature of the material being covered and a way it is organized, the volume will appeal to the well-established communities including those active in various disciplines in which social networks, their analysis and optimization are of genuine relevance. Those involved in operations research, management, various branches of engineering, and economics will benefit from the exposure to the subject matter.

This first hands-on guide to ISO-compliant Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) makes this powerful tool immediately accessible to both professionals and students. Following a general introduction on the philosophy and purpose of LCA, the reader is taken through all the stages of a complete LCA analysis, with each step exemplified by real-life data from a major LCA project on beverage packaging. Measures as carbon and water footprint, based on the most recent international standards and definitions, are addressed. Written by two pioneers of LCA, this practical volume is targeted at first-time LCA users but equally makes a much-valued reference for more experienced practitioners. From the content: * Goal and Scope Definition * Life Cycle Inventory Analysis * Life Cycle Impact Assessment * Interpretation, Reporting and Critical Review * From LCA to Sustainability Assessment and more.