Book excerpt: It has been recognized that productivity improvement is an important issue of the 80' s. It is regarded as the most efficient way to improve national economy and to enrich the quality of life. The key to productivity improvement is advanced automation, especially computer-integrated automation for engineering design and office operations as well as manufacturing processes. This is the theme of 1983 International Conference on Advanced Automation, ICAA-83. This book contains the articles which are the revised and updated version of the papers presented at the ICAA-83 Conference. Traditionally, automation is synonymous with mechanization; but this Conference has treated automation from a different point of view. We consider automation as a process to unify various automated information processing systems for performing business, administration, design, engineering and manufacturing functions, in addition to the traditional fixed automation in production. In other words, design automation and office automation form an inte gral part of factory automation to accomplish comprehensive computer-integrated manufacturing and production. In engineering and manufacturing today, quality design and high productivity are synonymous with the use of computers, robots, expert systems, and other computer-based technologies. The greater the degree of computer-based automation exploited and implemented, the greater a nation's ability to survive in tomorrow's extremely competitive world market.