"Collaborative Product and Service Life Cycle Management for a Sustainable World" gathers together papers from the 15th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering (CE2008), to stimulate the new thinking that is so crucial to our sustained productivity enhancement and quality of life. It is already evident in this new century that the desire for sustainable development is increasingly driving the market to reach for new and innovative solutions that more effectively utilize the resources we have inherited from previous generations; with the obvious responsibility to future...

The general theme of the CE2009 Conference is the recognised requirement for advancements in Concurrent Engineering (CE) with a global perspective for competitive enterprise, economy and ecology. CE appeared in the '80s as the concept of parallel performing engineering design activities and the integration of all related processes. This concept is based on the general assumption that different components of the product life cycle should be considered together and relatively early. The main goal of CE is to make processes more efficient and more resistant to errors.

Since then the...