Introduction to Engineering Informatics

Abstract

This work offers a panorama view about a new engineering science discipline: Engineering Informatics. Engineering informatics is an applied information science sub-domain that is scoped to address the information technology (IT) knowledge, methods, models, and algorithms that support engineering and management activities ranging from customer requirements to design and production operations. In this work, a number of key application areas of engineering informatics are analyzed, i.e. product development, measuring product development performance, and concurrent and collaborative engineering. In addition, a special engineering informatics application domain, chemical engineering, is reviewed in order to illustrate an industry-specific scenario. Two fundamental technologies of engineering informatics, object-oriented (OO) software engineering and semantic modeling, are briefly introduced.