Foreword

With the advent of the elements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and its capability to enhance manufacturing operations, industries are looking for the optimal way to adjust their business models to accommodate some emerging technologies. This is to ensure global competitiveness, increase in productivity, effective response to customers’ and market requirements, and reduction in manufacturing lead-time without sacrificing the quality of the final product.

This book brings together some innovative technologies relating to manufacturing and production engineering with a view to assist industries to gain a competitive edge in the face of dynamic production requirements and environments. It also presents some practical guided approaches that could assist manufacturers in making effective decisions, which can translate to sustainability in terms of profitability, material conservation, optimum energy consumption, safety, as well as environmental friendliness. Alongside the expertise of the contributing authors, my teaching and research experiences in production engineering were harnessed to provide recent research, practice, and theories that are relevant to manufacturing, production, and industrial engineering.

Furthermore, the processing of emerging materials for applications in the rail, aerospace, biomedical automobile, and biomedical industries was also considered in this book. Some of the technologies presented in the book are still emerging and will be of great benefit to production engineers, industrial engineers, and manufacturing industries in the quest to solve some of the challenges relating to manufacturing and production activities.