Sustainable Development in the Digital Era

Collaborative manufacturing and management are a fundamental requirement in today’s digital age, to enable an innovative and sustainable development of companies. This is possible and highly recommended not just in the context of traditional companies, but further in cyber physical systems and in the context of extended, distributed, networked and virtual organizations.

The book provides fundamental methodologies, models, methods, tools, and platforms about collaborative engineering, to support manufacturing and management processes and practices, aligned with the current requirements underlying Industry 4.0, and Society 5.0. It describes the application of collaborative management paradigms, about dynamic, distributed, integrated, intelligent, predictive, parallel, and real-time based approaches and tools to enable collaborating entities, including suppliers, business partners and other stakeholders, to develop projects and solve problems that are becoming increasingly more complex and challenging currently. Such collaborative processes and practices require companies and underlying stakeholders to be connected, and to further communicate, and share data, problems, and expertise, and other kind of resources, along with concerns, difficulties, and challenges, requiring co-learning, and the co-creation of knowledge, processes, methods, and systems to interactively support projects and problem solving.

The book reviews the advances and provides case studies to assist scientists, practitioners and students in high standard manufacturing management processes and practices, to properly handle daily problems and challenges, with a special focus on the use of recent paradigms and tools to support manufacturing management decision making, through innovative methodologies and approaches for permitting researchers to learn, develop further work, and become advanced practitioners and promoters of collaborative management.

Leonilde Varela received her Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering and Management from the University of Minho, Portugal in 2007. She is an Associate Professor with Habilitation at the Department of Production and Systems of University of Minho. Her main research interests are in Manufacturing Management, Production Planning and Control, Optimization, Artificial Intelligence, Meta-heuristics, Scheduling, Web- based Systems, Services, and technologies, mainly for supporting Engineering and Production Management, Collaborative Networks, Decision- Making Models, Methods, and Systems, and Virtual and Distributed Enterprises for Industry 4.0. She has published more than 200 refereed scientific papers in international conferences and in international scientific books and journals, indexed in the Web of Science and/or in the Scopus databases. Coordinates R&D projects in the area of Production and Systems Engineering, namely, concerning the development of web-based platforms and decision support models, methods, and systems. Email: leonilde@dps.uminho.pt

Goran Putnik received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Production Engineering from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Belgrade, and the DSc (Ph.D.) in mechanical engineering from the University of Belgrade, in 1993. He joined the Motor Industry Rakovica, Belgrade, Serbia, and 3 years later joined the Department of Production Engineering at Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Belgrade as Assistant Researcher. In 1993, he joined the University of Minho, Portugal, where he is currently Full Professor in the Department of Production and Systems Engineering. His research and teaching interests include areas of production systems, automata, and formal theory. He is the author of 13 books, more than 250 articles, and coordinator of a number of international projects. Professor Putnik is member of the IFIP WG 5.5 – “Cooperation infrastructure for Virtual Enterprises and electronic business – COVE”, and of the International Academy for Production Engineering – CIRP, Paris. Email: putnikgd@dps.uminho.pt

Vijaya Kumar Manupati is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Operations and Supply Chain Division, Indian Institute of Management. He received his Ph.D. in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. His research interests include intelligent manufacturing systems, agent/multi-agent/mobile-agent systems for distributed control, simulation, integration of process planning and scheduling, sustainable supply chain, and evolutionary algorithms. He has published more than 75 publications which include journals like International Journal of Production Research, Computers, and Industrial Engineering, International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Journal of Engineering, Journal of Measurements, International, Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing. Email: manupativijay@iimmumbai.ac.in