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Computer Aided Design (CAD) technology plays a key role in today's advanced manufacturing environment. To reduce the time to market, achieve zero defect quality the at first production, and use available production and logistics resources effectively, product and design process knowledge covering the whole product life cycle must be used throughout product design. Once generated, this intensive design knowledge should be made available to later life cycle activities. Due to the increasing concern about global environmental issues and rapidly changing economical situation worldwide, design must exhibit high performance not only in quality and productivity, but also in life cycle issues, including extended producer's liability. This requires designers and engineers to use various kinds of design knowledge intensively during product design and to generate design information for use in later stages of the product life cycle such as production, distribution, operation, maintenance, reclamation, and recycling. Therefore, future CAD systems must incorporate product and design process knowledge, which is not explicitly dealt with in the current systems, in their design tools and design object models.

Knowledge Intensive Design Technology is a collection of papers presented at the Fifth Workshop on Knowledge Intensive CAD, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 5.2 and hosted by the Department of Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Malta in July 2002. The book chapters progressively take the reader through the following sequential sections; -Part One - KIC Development Approaches, -Part Two - Knowledge Systematization, -Part Three - Prototype KIC Systems.Knowledge Intensive Design Technology makes essential reading for practicing engineers/scientists involved in R&D as well as for relevant Masters and Ph.D. students. The book is also pertinent to those in industry concerned with capturing and structuring company-specific knowledge for proactive reuse to increase product development efficiency, and also to those involved in the development of CAD systems.

It is well-known that some 85% of the resources necessary to design and bring to market a product are committed by decisions taken in the first 10% of the design activity. This together with the wish to reduce further the time-to-market of high quality innovative products has increased the need for computer support at the conceptual design stage of the engineering design process life-style. This proceedings firmly focuses on the continuing research into new uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI) during the conceptual design process. It shows how novel applications of AI may be integrated with aspects of solid modelling, simulation optimisation and multiple criterion decision- making. A particular emphasis is placed on the use of AI methods in the overall design of products from major Civil Engineering structures to Consumer Electronics.

PROLAMAT (PROgraming LAnguages for MAchine Tools) is a series of international conferences devoted to the filed of manufacturing - 1969 Roma, Italy; 1973, Budapest, Hungary; 1976, Stirling, Scotland; 1979 Ann Arbor, USA; 1982 Leningrad, USSR; 1992 Tokyo, Japan; 1995 Berlin, Germany; 1998, Trento, Italy; 2001, Budapest, Hungary; - organized by IFIP the International Federation for Information Processing. This triennial event has been a basic meeting for academic and industrial experts in manufacturing. Recently not only the original topics, but all other aspects of the computerized design and production of products and production systems from traditional to virtual ones have been covered and dealt with, including life-cycle issues. This volume contains the edited version of the technical presentations of PROLMAT 2006, the IFIP TC5 international conference held on June 15-17, 2006 at the Shanghai University in China. The main theme of this conference is'Knowledge Enterprise'. These proceedings focus on the issue of how to translate data and information into knowledge in manufacturing enterprises. Profitability is no longer only a function of price, cost, and adequate quality.

Computer technology has revolutionized many aspects of building design, such as drafting, management, construction - even building with robots. This revolution has expanded into the field of design creativity. Presented in this book is an up-to-date, comprehensive picture of research advances in the fast-growing field of informatics applied to conceptual stages in the generation of artifacts - in particular, buildings. It addresses the question how far and in what ways creative design can be intelligently automated.Among the topics covered are: the use of precedents; the relations between case-based, rule-based, and principle-based architectural design reasoning; product typology; artifact thesauruses; the inputting and retrieval of architectural knowledge; the visual representation and understanding of existing or projected built forms; empirical and analytical models of the design process and the design product; desktop design toolkits; grammars of shape and of function; multiple-perspective building data structures; design as a multi-agent collaborative process; the integration of heterogeneous engineering information; and foundations for a systematic approach to the development of knowledge-based design systems.The papers provide a link between basic and practical issues: - fundamental questions in the theory of artifact design, artifical intelligence, and the cognitive science of imagination and reasoning; - problems in the computerization of building data and design facilities; - the practical tasks of building conception, construction and evaluation. The automation of creative design is itself considered as an engineering design problem. The implications of current and future work for architectural education and research in architectural history, as well as for computer-integrated construction and the management of engineering projects are considered.