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This book of proceedings is the synthesis of all the papers, including keynotes presented during the 20th CIRP Design conference. The book is structured with respect to several topics, in fact the main topics that serve at structuring the program. For each of them, high quality papers are provided. The main topic of the conference was Global Product Development. This includes technical, organizational, informational, theoretical, environmental, performance evaluation, knowledge management, and collaborative aspects. Special sessions were related to innovation, in particular extraction of knowledge from patents.

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General trends in global product developments.- Evolutions of global product development approaches.- Early stage design in global product development.- Ecological Aspects in global product development.- Models and Methods for Variation Management in global product development.- Requirements management in global product development.- Collaborative Aspects in global product development.- Integration Product-Process in global product development.- Product Design Models for global product development.- Product design methods for global product development.- Value, Risk and Cost Management in global product development.- Knowledge Management for creative and inventive design in global product development.- Patents as resources for Creative and Inventive Design for global product development.- Metrics and Benchmarking, performance evaluation for global product development.- Rapid Product Development, Reverse Engineering, Virtual Reality for global product development.

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Prof. A. Bernard graduated in 1982 from ENS Cachan. He contributed to LURPA laboratory (Research Laboratory for Production), with Prof. Bourdet, from 1983 and obtained his PhD in 1989, on 3D feature-based manufacturing of forging dies. As an assistant professor, he worked from 1990, for six years, with Prof. Bocquet in Ecole Centrale Paris (Research laboratory on Mechanical Engineering and Logistics) on product, technology and process modeling. He also created, in 1993, the rapid prototyping and reverse engineering platform of Ecole Centrale Paris, the CREATE (European Rapid prototyping Center for Assistance, Transfert and Experiment). He is the vice-president of AFPR (French Rapid Prototyping Association) and its representative in GARPA (Global Alliance of Rapid Prototyping Associations). From 1996 to 2001, he was Professor in CRAN laboratory (Research Center for Automatic Control of Nancy) in Nancy, where he managed a research group (ICF) on mechanical and production engineering. His main research topics are related to global product development, knowledge management, knowledge-based systems (applied to machining, rapid prototyping and reverse engineering), and product/process/organisation modeling. Pr Alain BERNARD works now in the Ecole Centrale de Nantes, and manages a research group (Virtual Engineering for Industrial Engineering) at the IRCCyN (Research Institute for Communications and Cybernetics of Nantes).

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