A technological book is written and published for one of two reasons: it either renders some other book in the same field obsolete or breaks new ground in the sense that a gap is filled. The present book aims to do the latter. On my return from industry to an academic career, I started writing this book because I had seen that a gap existed. Although a great deal of information appeared in the published literature about various technical aspects of advanced manufacturing technology (AMT), surprisingly little had been written about the systems con text within which the sophisticated hardware and software of AMT are utilized to increase efficiency. Therefore, I have attempted in this book to show how structured approaches in the design and evaluation of modern manufacturing plant may be adopted, with the objective of improving the performance of the factory as a whole. I hope this book will be a contribution to the newly recognized, multidisciplinary engineering function known as manufacturing sys tems engineering. The text has been designed specifically to demonstrate the systems aspects of modern manufacturing operations, including: systems con cepts of manufacturing operation; manufacturing systems modelling and evalua tion; and the structured design of manufacturing systems~ One of the major difficulties associated with writing a text of this nature stems from the diversity of the topics involved. I have attempted to solve this problem by adopting an overall framework into which the relevant topics are fitted.
