Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture V

Book excerpt: The Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture Conference series is now in its tenth year and has become a well-established, application-oriented meeting recognised by several UK Engineering Institutions and the International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computing. The main theme of the conference again relates to the integration of evolutionary and adaptive computing technologies with design and manufacturing processes whilst also taking into account complementary advanced computing technologies. Evolutionary and adaptive computing techniques continue to increase their penetration of industrial and commercial practice as their powerful search, exploration and optimisation capabilities become ever more apparent. The last two years have seen a very significant increase in the development of commercial software tools utilising adaptive computing technologies and the emergence of related commercial research and consultancy organisations supporting the introduction of best practice in terms of industrial utilisation. Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture V is comprised of selected papers that cover a diverse set of industrial application areas including: engineering design and design environments, manufacturing process design, scheduling and control, electronic circuit design, fault detection. Various aspects of search and optimisation such as multi-objective and constrained optimisation are also investigated in the context of integration with industrial processes. In addition to evolutionary computing techniques, both neural-net and agent-based technologies play a role in a number of contributions. This collection of papers will be of particular interest to both industrial researchers and practitioners in addition to the academic research communities of engineering, operational research and computer science.