It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 13th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications, CE2006 being held in Antibes, France. The previous events were held in Dallas, Texas, USA (2005), Beijing, China (CE2004), Madeira Island, Portugal (CE2003), Cranfield, UK (CE2002), Anaheim, USA (CE2001), Lyon, France (CE2000), Bath, UK (CE99), Tokyo, Japan (CE98), Rochester, USA (CE97), Toronto, Canada (CE96), McLean, USA (CE95), Pittsburgh, USA (CE94). CE2007 and CE2008 are planned for Brazil and Australia, respectively.

The CEXX conference series were launched by the International Society for Productivity Enhancement (ISPE) which, for more than a decade now, has constituted an important forum for international scientific exchange on concurrent engineering. These conferences attract more than a hundred researchers, industrials and students interested in the recent advances in concurrent engineering research and applications. Concurrent engineering is known as a strategic weapon to achieve industrial competitiveness by developing products better, cheaper and faster using multi-functional teamwork.

The underlying focus of CE2006 Conference is in developing new methodologies, techniques and tools based on Web technologies required to support the key objectives of CE. For several years, with different technologies of information diffusion and sharing provided by the Web, new opportunities have appeared to improve the concurrent engineering approach. Bringing together concurrent engineering with Web technology and applications constitutes the strong and innovative points of the CE2006 Conference. The Web is not merely an immense book where people can search, browse, and view information. It is also a vast database that can allow computers to do more useful work. By developing a Web that holds information for both human and machine processing, people solve problems that would otherwise be too tedious or complex to solve (www.w3.org).

The International Program Committee has decided to select the following major areas for CE2006:

Keynote and invited papers

Web services

Interoperability and interfacing

Collaborative, mobile and multimodal environment

Semantic Enterprise, Semantic Web and ontologies

Knowledge in CE

Global Standardization

Information Systems in CE

Semantic indexing of documents

Innovation and business strategies

Design, manufacturing and services

Cost engineering

Education, social aspects and humanities

Tools and applications

We would like to thank all the authors for the high quality of their papers. We would like also to acknowledge the contribution of the key invited speakers, CE2006 International Program Committee and all session chairs in making a successful conference. We thank sincerely the members of the executive and organizing committees who helped in all aspects of organizing the conference (in particular Moisés Dutra Lima, Lionel Médini and Monique Simonetti). Last, we would like to gratefully acknowledge the institutional support and encouragement that we have received from our sponsors (in particular ISPE, INRIA, UCBL, W3C) and the funding received from Conseil Régional PACA, Ministère francais des affaires étrangères.

Parisa Ghodous, General Chair CE2006, University Lyon I, France

Rose Dieng-Kuntz, Local Chair CE2006, INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France

Geilson Loureiro, Program Chair, LIT, INPE France