| Summary: | Flexibility is as acceptable an objective for today's industrial community as is automation. Thus, the title of this conference proceedings volume - Flexible Automation - reflects an added emphasis to the usual industrial automation. As with general automation that has impacted every component of the manufacturing office and plant, the identity of flexible automation can possess various forms and functions. The papers in this volume have been grouped into two main categories. One category deals with implementation of so-called "intelligent manufacturing". This means use of algorithmic methods and artificial intelligence approaches to various problems encountered in practical factory automation tasks. The placement of papers into five chapters of this part cannot be very precise, due to multidisciplinary nature and constant rapid change of the field. The categories are arranged starting from problems of enhancement of current factory settings, and followed by the papers addressing more specific issues of production planning, process technology and product engineering. The fifth chapter contains papers on the very important aspects of factory automation - problems of design, simulation, operation and monitoring of manufacturing cells
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