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...