Special Issue: Advances in Computer Aided Manufacturing

Abstract

In 2007 we have computing power and infrastructure that are remarkable in terms of both speed and cost. A casual observer would expect the effects of this technological “free lunch” on Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) to be an equally dramatic advance. However it is a measure of this field's difficulty that very few of the problems, which invariably involve complex three-dimensional geometry, can be solved by brute force computing. Arguably this is because CAM researchers frequently encounter the following two challenges under different disguises across the field.