Special issue on integrated and hybrid intelligent systems in product design and development

With ever increasing complexity of products and customer demands, companies are adopting new strategies to meet the changing technological requirements, shorter product life cycles, and globalization of manufacturing operations. Product design and development are getting more sophisticated procedures/processes involved and require designers and engineers possessing different expertise, knowledge and experience to work together [1,2]. To address these challenges, techniques based on artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly being used to improve effectiveness and efficiency in the product design and development life cycle. Intelligent systems can be beneficially applied to many aspects of design and also design-related tasks, for example, identifying customer demands and requirements, design and planning, production, delivery, marketing and customer services, etc. Individual intelligent paradigms (such as fuzzy logic, neural network, genetic algorithm, case-based reasoning, and especially expert systems) have been applied to specific stages of the design process (especially expert systems). However, increasingly, hybrid solutions, that integrate multiple individual intelligent techniques, are required to solve complex design problems. The integrated and hybrid intelligent environment can provide various information and knowledge for supporting rapid and intelligent decision-making throughout the entire design and development process. This is in line with the evolutionary trends of product design and development process, from the traditional CAD systems into the knowledgebased engineering and integrated intelligent design systems through a combination of concurrent engineering, collaborative engineering and integrated and hybrid AI techniques. In recent years, with the advancement of AI and intelligent systems techniques, integrated and hybrid intelligent systems are gaining better acceptance in product design and development. The driving force behind this is that integrated and hybrid intelligence and distributed 3C (collaboration, cooperation, and coordination) allow the capture human knowledge and the application of it so as to achieve high quality designs/products. Further motivation arises from steady advances in individual and hybrid intelligent-systems techniques, and the widespread availability of computing resources and communications capability through intranets and the World Wide Web [1]. This special issue aims to collect relevant original works in the application of emerging integrated and hybrid intelligent systems techniques to the design of products, processes and systems in product development. The goal is to take a snapshot of the progress in the research into the support for product design and development and to disseminate how recent developments in integrated, knowledge-intensive and computational AI techniques can improve and enhance such support. The selected papers provide an integrated, holistic perspective on this complex set of challenges and provide rigorous research results. The focus of this special issue is on the integrated and hybrid intelligent methodologies, frameworks and systems for support-