Publisher's Synopsis
During the last five years, artificial intelligence techniques have been increasingly employed in production automation; giving rise to a new generation of Intelligent Manufacturing Systems or IMS. The concept of IMS is of vital importance to the "factory of the future", which will be mainly computer controlled, and this publication brings together the latest research in key areas such as; manufacturing systems operations; processes and planning; concurrent engineering; simulation and fault detection, in a way which will appeal to practitioners in both academia and industry.
