New technologies for the intelligent design and operation of manufacturing networks

The strength of the European economy in the global competition has two significant foundations. The first one is the ability to provide higly specific and customer-centred products on short-term requests. The second one, which is clearly related to the first one, is the huge number of very efficient manufacturing networks. The network companies supplement and support each other in terms of capabilities and capacities, and thus achieve services that would be infeasible or uncompetitive for a single network member. This book presents novel results from research projects that are co-funded by the EUropean Commission in the 6th Framework Programme, demonstrating the progress in the management of production units and production networks with the ambition of utmost flexibility and cooperation efficiency, amended by perspectives of future research to be addressed.