The authors of this book have been in charge of over thirty industrial contracts of various length (from six months to three years); the companies involved covered a wide range of industrial activities, including steel making, hot and cold rolling, aerospace research, automobile manufactur- ing, chemical manufacturing, coal mining, bronze casting, and mechanical engineering. All contracts were related to problems connected either with the preliminary design of production systems or with the management of these systems. The problems that the authors investigated involved not only designing and...

This book is the result of the fourth International Symposium on Data Analysis held on June 1985 at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles with the help'of the European Institute for Advanced Management. As the preceding ones, the organization of the Symposium started with a call for real life problems from which an International Com- mittee selected six topics and asked for several solutions. These topics are: I) Multivariate and longitudinal data on growing children 2) Prehistoric assemblages and lithic artifacts from a small We- european area 3) A comparison of results of European elections 4)...