With collaborative product development in a geographically distributed environment and global outsourcing becoming normal for many companies, it is imperative to bring academics, researchers and industrialists together to share research ideas and best practice. The European-Asia Symposium on Engineering Design and Manufacture (EASED 2004) provides such a platform and aims to increase the exchange of ideas and best practice among practitioners and researchers from two major global regions - Europe and Asia. As the manufacturing activities, associated with the design activities in European, American and Japan, are being transferred to Asia, it is timely to organise this International Symposium. The Symposium brings together research experts and industrialists to focus on the issues related to these global changes. This geographical distribution of tasks involved in the whole engineering product realisation process brings great challenge as well as huge benefits. This Symposium provides a platform for academic researchers and industrial practitioners to exchange ideas used to address the challenges presented by this new global economic development. This book presents 75 papers from 185 accepted refereed papers presented at EASED2004.
