In today's globally competitive manufacturing arena, increasing customers' demands for the timely delivery of high quality products have forced companies to update their designs and make design changes more frequently than ever before. Rapid response manufacutering (RRM) has to become a goal pursued by many to shorten time-to-market, improve quality-to-cost, and enhance product reliability. Recently, many new technologies have been developed for engineers to reduce the time required to design and manufacture products in response to rapidly fluctuating market demands. This work addresses a variety of contemporary methodologies, technologies and tools for rapid response manufacturing. The contributions to this volume focus on two major RRM areas, desktop manufacturing, and computer and information technologies.This book should be of interest to research directors, associates and engineers; federal and military research laboratories, NIST, US airforce, US army, US navy, DOE and DOD; product design engineers,; manufacturing engineers; CAD/CAM/CAE software developers; virtual reality developers within automotive, aircraft, engine, ship building and architecture; professors; associate and assistant professors; research associates; post-doctors; graduate students in computer science, engineering, electric engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, material science, metrology, civil engineering and industrial/mechanical technology.
