Collaborative Engineering for Product Design and Development

Edited by Monplaisir and Singh (both of the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Wayne State U.), this collection of 12 contributions react to the modern manufacturing environment in which the typical functions of product development such as design, manufacturing, assembly, testing, quality assurance, and purchasing are dispersed geographically and the use of information technologies such as the Internet/intranet are used to facilitate integrated business environments. Analyzing the collaborative technologies, processes, and methodologies, the aim of the chapters are to present the recent research in the areas of computer-supported collaborative work, collaborative decision making, distributed computing, integrated product design and development, web-based collaborative design, virtual manufacturing, and global manufacturing. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)