Collaborative Design and Planning for Digital Manufacturing presents a focused collection of quality chapters on the state-of-the-art research efforts in the area of collaborative design and planning, as well as their practical applications towards digital manufacturing.

A range of innovative methods and collaborative systems is analysed, examining the emerging technologies and their practical applications that contribute directly to digital manufacturing. Each chapter of the book addresses a specific new approach and offers practical solutions for real scenarios of collaborative design and planning in digital manufacturing. The authors discuss solutions in a number of areas, including:

. cross-discipline information sharing;

. workflow management;

. integration of suppliers into a process chain; and

. performance measures of distributed manufacturing systems.

Collaborative Design and Planning for Digital Manufacturing provides both a broad-based review of the key areas of research in digital manufacturing, and an in-depth treatment of particular methodologies and systems, from collaborative design to distributed planning, monitoring and control. Recent development and innovations in this area provide a pool of focused research efforts, relevant to a wide readership from academic researchers to practising engineers.