method enables readers to: *efficiently design higher-quality, lower cost objects with less metal requirements, vibration and noise, and with lower dynamic loads and energy consumption *determine optimal solutions, regardless of the number of criteria involved, and to identify relationships among different criteria and between criteria and design variables *accurately account for discrepancies between theoretical and actual characteristics, using a special set of adequacy criteria *determine optimal design variables for complex finite element models In addition, the book helps readers: *enhance the potential of the PSI method with theoretical investigations and algorithms for approximating the feasible solutions set and Pareto optimal set *facilitate proficient problem-solving by incorporating recently obtained results from the theory of uniformly distributed sequences *evaluate design procedures by observing examples ranging from machine tools and agricultural equipment to automobiles and aviation This practical, in-depth treatment of multicriteria optimization and engineering is essential for engineers and designers working in research and development of manufacturing machines, mechanisms and structures. It is also an important text for students of applied mathematics, mechanical engineering, optimal control and operations research.

In the last decades, the production of goods and the offer of services have become quite complex activities mostly because of the markets globalisation, of the continuous push to the innovation and of the constant requests from more and more demanding markets. The main objective of a company system has become the achievement of the quality for the business management cycle. This cycle goes from the design (Plan) to the production (Do), from the control (Check) to the man agement (Action), as well as to the marketing and distribution. Nowadays, the Total Quality of the company system is evaluated, according to the ISO 9000 regulations, in terms of its capacity to adjust the design and the pro duction to the needs expressed (explicitly or implictly) by the final users of a product/service. In this process, the use of statistical techniques is essential not only in the classical approach of Quality Control of a product but also, and most importantly, in the Quality Design oriented to the satisfaction of customers. Thus, Total Quality refers to the global capacity of a company to fit its system to the real needs of its customers by designing products which are able to match the customers' taste and by implementing a statistical control of both the product and the Customer Satisfaction. In such a process of design and evaluation, several statistical variables are involved and with a different nature (numerical, categorical, ordinal).

Variability arises in multistage manufacturing processes (MMPs) from a variety of sources. Variation reduction demands data fusion from product/process design, manufacturing process data, and quality measurement. Statistical process control (SPC), with a focus on quality data alone, only tells half of the story and is a passive method, taking corre