The focus of the Congress will be leading-edge manufacturing processes. Topics include manufacturing at extreme speed, size, accuracy, methodology, use of resources, interdisciplinarity and more. Contributions from production and industrial engineering are welcome. Challenges from the areas of manufacturing, machines and production systems will be addressed. Production research constantly pushes the boundaries of what is feasible. The Congress "Production at the leading edge of technology" will highlight production processes that are advancing into areas that until recently were considered unfeasible, also in terms of methodology, use of resources and interdisciplinarity. But where does the search for new limits lead? Which limitations do we still have to overcome, which ones do we not want to overcome? The aim of the German-speaking colloquium is to establish connections between the research locations and to intensify the overall transfer of results and experience with industrial users.

This book offers cutting-edge knowledge on various design and product development related technologies, and applications of these technologies in fashion. Further, it envisions the future of these technologies when designing and engineering apparel-related products. Demonstrating how theory turns into practice, this volume presents the analysis of cases representing a successful collaboration between innovative technology and fashion. These current examples of industry and consumer cases with the use of various technologies will allow readers to fully connect how the industry currently implements these technologies into product design and development process as well as communicating with consumers. This text will serve as a valuable resource to researchers and educators in the fields of supply chain management, branding, marketing, fashion studies, textiles, and product design.

This congress proceedings provides recent research on leading-edge manufacturing processes. The aim of this scientific congress is to work out diverse individual solutions of "production at the leading edge of technology" and transferable methodological approaches. In addition, guest speakers with different backgrounds will give the congress participants food for thoughts, interpretations, views and suggestions. The manufacturing industry is currently undergoing a profound structural change, which on the one hand produces innovative solutions through the use of high-performance communication and information technology, and on the other hand is driven by new requirements for goods, especially in the mobility and energy sector. With the social discourse on how we should live and act primarily according to guidelines of sustainability, structural change is gaining increasing dynamic. It is essential to translate politically specified sustainability goals into socially accepted and marketable technical solutions. Production research is meeting this challenge and will make important contributions and provide innovative solutions from different perspectives.

“We do not know where Silicon Valley is really located”, Feldman writes, because these types of organization, when they are dynamic, are moving and fluid. Innovation and production ecosystems or clusters are proliferating today because they seem to be adapted to the demands of innovation, growth and employment. The process leading to their institutionalization escapes a summary analysis of the behavior triggered by monetary incentives or, at the very least, makes it richer. The relational aspect becomes predominant, the interactions between the participants testify to the difficulty of separating the geographical and social dimensions. In the most prominent American clusters, public/private linkages and the building of social links express the centrality of networks in the innovation process. The European vision seeks to articulate entrepreneurial discoveries with vertical public interventions. The competitiveness poles in France suffer from the fact that public choices seem to be torn between two contradictory objectives: efficiency and equity.

Towards Balanced Automation The concept. Manufacturing industries worldwide are facing tough challenges as a consequence of the globalization of economy and the openness of the markets. Progress of the economic blocks such as the European Union, NAFTA, and MERCOSUR, and the global agreements such as GATT, in addition to their obvious economic and social consequences, provoke strong paradigm shifts in the way that the manufacturing systems are conceived and operate. To increase profitability and reduce the manufacturing costs, there is a recent tendency towards establishing partnership links among the involved industries, usually between big industries and the networks of components' suppliers. To benefit from the advances in technology, similar agreements are being established between industries and universities and research institutes. Such an open tete-cooperation network may be identified as an extended enterprise or a virtual enterprise. In fact, the manufacturing process is no more carried out by a single enterprise, rather each enterprise is just a node that adds some value (a step in the manufacturing chain) to the cooperation network of enterprises. The new trends create new scenarios and technological challenges, especially to the Small and Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) that clearly comprise the overwhelming majority of manufacturing enterprises worldwide. Under the classical scenarios, these SMEs would have had big difficulties to access or benefit from the state of the art technology, due to their limited human, financial, and material resources.