Manufacturing Systems and Technologies for the New Frontier

Collected here are 112 papers concerned with all manner of new directions in manufacturing systems given at the 41^st CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems. The high-quality material presented in this volume includes reports of work from both scientific and engineering standpoints and several invited and keynote papers addressing the current cutting edge and likely future trends in manufacturing systems. The book's subjects include: (1) new trends in manufacturing systems design: sustainable design, ubiquitous manufacturing, emergent synthesis, service engineering, value creation, cost engineering, human and social aspects of manufacturing, etc.; (2) new applications for manufacturing systems - medical, life-science, optics, NEMS, etc.; (3) intelligent use of advanced methods and new materials - new manufacturing process technologies, high-hardness materials, bio-medical materials, etc.; (4) integration and control for new machines - compound machine tools, rapid prototyping, printing process integration, etc.

Fumihiko Kimura is a professor in the Department of Precision Machinery Engineering of the University of Tokyo. He was a research associate at the Electrotechnical Laboratory of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry from 1974 to 1979. He then moved to the University of Tokyo, and was an associate professor from 1979 to 1987.

He created his first solid modeling system GEOMAP in his doctoral work in 1974, and he is one of the pioneers in the field of solid modeling and CAD/CAM research. Since then he has been active in the fields of solid modeling, free-form surface modelling and product modelling. Today his primary research area is Digital Engineering and Inverse Manufacturing (Environmentally Benign Manufacturing). His research interests now include the basic theory of CAD/CAM, concurrent engineering, engineering simulation, virtual manufacturing, total product life cycle modelling and management, reuse-oriented product/system design, and preventive maintenance. He has participated in IMS Projects, such as Globeman, Licopro and Promise, for more than 10 years. He is involved in the product model data exchange standardization activities of ISO/TC184/SC4, and is a national representative of ISO/TC184 and IFIP TC5, a member of IFIP WG5.2 and 5.3, and a fellow of CIRP, JSME and JSPE. He is a chairman of the evaluation committee of the IMS Program under METI, Japan, the technical committee of the Inverse Manufacturing Forum, MSTC, and other governmental and public committees.

He graduated from the Department of Aeronautics, the University of Tokyo, in 1968, and received a Dr. Eng. Sci. degree in aeronautics from the University of Tokyo in 1974.