Preface.

Kuttner, Rein ; Otto, Tauno

Over the past 14 years, DAAAM Baltic has been an international forum for scientistes and engineers for presenting their research results in the areas of industrial engineering, manufacturing and automation. During these years its scope has been expanded from design engineering, production engineering, production management and materials engineering to mechatronics and system design.

Conference DAAAM Baltic 2010 brought together scientists from the academic communities and industry to explore trends in product and manufacturing development, based on the use of IT and computer systems. Conference aimed to bring together scientists from the academic communities and enterprise sector to share their experiences and to foster collaboration. The DAAAM Baltic focus encompasses theoretical and practical methodologies, resolving technologies of CAD, CAE, MPC etc, considering completeness, dynamics of change, new technology insertion, complexity, integration and marketing. Our society needs engineers and managers, who have technological knowledge, global vision and professional management knowledge in order to meet the challenges of the new age.

The DAAAM Baltic 2010 conference continued the mission of a series of conferences, which is to give for scientists of the Baltic Sea region the opportunity to present their research results and to find partners for cooperation. In 2010, over 160 proposals for presentations were reviewed and 97 papers, sent by authors from 13 countries, were accepted.

DAAAM Baltic meetings are regional conferences, organized under auspices of Danube Adria Association for Automation and Manufacturing. This special issue contains a selection of papers, presented at the 7th International DAAAM Baltic Conference 2010. Another selection of the papers was published in the previous issue of the journal.

doi: 10.3176/eng.2011.1.01

Rein Kuttner

Tauno Otto

Guest editors, members of the Scientific Committee of DAAAM Baltic 2010