The idea of this book came to us in October 2002 at the international conference “Production systems design, supply chain management and logistics” (Miedzyzdroje, Poland). This conference was organized by an initiative group from certain French and Polish Universities with the objective to find a new synergy and to develop a Pan European (West – East) cooperation in the areas of: Design of production systems Supply and inventory management Production planning and scheduling Facility location, transportation and logistics Supply chain optimisation via simulation The conference was focused on a wide spectrum of optimisation problems taking into account Supply Chain paradigms, which create a pivotal idea to increase the productivity of modern production systems. The editors proposed to the group members, to present their results for this book. Some well-known scientists agreed also to participate in this work and sent us their contribution. The main idea of this book is that now, it is necessary to consider all the stages of product life cycle in an integrated approach, from the product/process design to the customer delivering. For example at the product design stage, we need to analyse and to optimise all the supply chain. The book is composed of 20 chapters divided into three parts.
