This book of proceedings contains papers peer reviewed and accepted for the 22nd ISPE Inc. International Conference on Concurrent Engineering, held at the TU Delft, The Netherlands, July 20–23th, 2015. This is the second issue of the newly introduced series “Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering” which publishes the proceedings of the CE conference series. The CE conference series is organized annually by the International Society of Productivity Enhancement (ISPE, Inc.) and constitutes an important forum for international scientific exchange on concurrent engineering and collaborative enterprises. These international conferences attract a significant number of researchers, industry experts and students, as well as government representatives, who are interested in the recent advances in concurrent engineering research, advancements and applications.

Developed in the 80's, the CE approach is based on the concept that different phases of a product lifecycle should be conducted concurrently and initiated as early as possible within the Product Creation Process (PCP), including the implications within the extended enterprise and networks. The main goal of CE is to increase the efficiency of the PCP and to reduce errors in the later phases, as well as to incorporate considerations for the full lifecycle and through-life operations. In the past decades, CE has become the substantive basic methodology in many industries (e.g., automotive, aerospace, machinery, shipbuilding, consumer goods, process industry, environmental engineering) and is also adopted in the development of new services and service support.

The initial basic CE concepts have matured and have become the foundations of many new ideas, methodologies, initiatives, approaches and tools. Generally, the current CE focus concentrates on enterprise collaboration and its many different elements; from integrating people and processes to very specific complete multi/inter/transdisciplinary solutions. Current research on CE is driven again by many factors like increased customer demands, globalization, (international) collaboration and environmental strategies. The successful application of CE in the past opens also the perspective for future applications like overcoming natural catastrophes and sustainable mobility concepts with electrical vehicles.

The CE2015 Organizing Committee has identified 31 thematic areas within CE and launched a Call For Papers accordingly, with resulting submissions submitted from all continents of the world. The conference is entitled: “Transdisciplinary Lifecycle Analysis of Systems”. This title reflects the variety of processes and methods which influences the modern product creation. Finally, the submissions as well as invited talks were collated into 18 streams led by outstanding researchers and practitioners.

The Proceedings contains 63 peer-reviewed papers by authors from 21 countries and 2 invited keynote papers. These papers range from the theoretical, conceptual to strongly pragmatic addressing industrial best practice. The involvement of more than 13 companies from many industries in the presented papers gives additional importance to this conference.

This book on ‘Transdisciplinary Lifecycle Analysis of Systems’ is directed at three constituencies: researchers, design practitioners, and educators. Researchers will benefit from the latest research results and knowledge of product creation processes and related methodologies. Engineering professionals and practitioners will learn from the current state of the art in concurrent engineering practice, new approaches, methods, tools and their applications. The educators in the CE community gather the latest advances and methodologies for dissemination in engineering curricula, while the community also encourages young educators to bring new ideas into the field.

Part 1 of the Proceedings comprises the keynotes while Part 2 is entitled Systems Engineering and contains an extensive overview on new research and development in Systems Engineering in research and practice. Part 3 outlines the importance of Customization and Variability Management within CE. It contains several methods for developing and producing customer-specific products and managing the variability of components and modules from which the product is composed. In Part 4, Production-Oriented Design and Maintenance and Repair, a variety of (cloud) approaches in manufacturing and service are highlighted. Part 5 addresses Design Methods and Knowledge-Based Engineering with many approaches to support the design process and building, saving, and using knowledge in the complex environment of CE. Part 6 focuses on Multi-Disciplinary Product Management with an emphasis on information management. Part 7 contains contributions on Sustainable Product Development, a subject that is gaining growing attention. Part 8 illustrates a number of key-topics on Service-Oriented Design. This topic is also very important in the context of CE. Part 9 deals with the Product Lifecycle Management, emphasizing the importance of management product data, information, and knowledge throughout the whole life of a product. Finally, Part 10 contains contributions on Trends in CE with ideas for further research on methods and tools with involvement of practice.

We acknowledge the high quality contributions of all authors to this book and the work of the members of the International Program Committee who assisted with the blind triple peer-review of the original papers submitted and presented at the conference. Readers are sincerely invited to consider all of the contributions made by this year's participants through the presentation of CE2015 papers collated into this book of proceedings. We hope that they will be further inspired in their work for disseminating their ideas for new approaches for sustainable product development in a multi-disciplinary environment within the ISPE, Inc. community.

Richard Curran, General Chair

TU Delft, The Netherlands

Nel Wognum, Co-General Chair

ISPE, Inc.

Milton Borsato, Program Chair

Federal University of Technology, Paraná-Curitiba, Brazil

Josip Stjepandić, Co-Program Chair

PROSTEP AG, Germany

Wim J.C. Verhagen, Secretary General

TU Delft, The Netherlands