Knowledge and Technology Integration in Production and Services presents novel application scenarios for balanced distributed and integrated systems based on knowledge and up-to-date technology and provides a great opportunity for discussion of concepts, models, methodologies, technological developments, case studies, new research ideas, and other results among specialists. It comprises the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information Technology for BALANCED AUTOMATION SYSTEMS in Manufacturing and Services (BASYS'02), which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in September 2002 in Cancun, Mexico. BASYS'02 aimed mainly at balancing knowledge and technology in manufacturing, services and the product life-cycle. Namely, a balance is considered between local knowledge-intensive solutions and global performance in highly distributed systems, based on diverse technologies (such as virtual organizations, holonic manufacturing systems or multi-agent systems for design and diagnostics).The contributions are focused on interoperability and standardization issues, open architectures as well as knowledge-based integration paradigms, with special attention being paid to product-service integration, customer-production integration, and product life-cycle stages integration. This book is essential reading for researchers, industrial managers, practitioners, developers, users or technology transfer experts -- working in quite different fields such as automatic control, systems planning and integration, enterprise architecture, planning and scheduling, flexible manufacturing, knowledge engineering, business processes management or in the field of social impact studies.
