Advanced products demand advanced CAD, CAM, and digital engineering systems. This is the main consideration in this special issue. It is well understood by all manufacturers nowadays that CAD, CAM, and digital engineering systems behave as “Hidden factories” of engineering information processing and are indispensable to the accomplishment of their daily tasks. No products can be planned, designed, machined, and assembled without these hidden factories. The history of CAD/CAM goes back nearly five decades, yet the technologies are still immature: a lot of technical issues remain to be solved because new materials and structures have been introduced in products, new manufacturing technologies have been utilized, and new social needs, such as the need for ”eco-X” or ”human-oriented” products, have grown along with the dramatic changes in society. New high-performance computing resources, such asWeb-based computing or GPUcomputing, have also become available for implementation in these systems. Thirteen technical papers in this issue tackle these challenges, proposing solutions from utilizing technologies, including computer-aided geometric design (CAGD), CAD, CAE, CAPP, and CAM, as well as novel human interfaces for these systems. Some of the papers, revised and extended in response to the editors’ invitations, are versions of works presented at the Asian Conference on Design and Digital Engineering 2012 (Niseko, Japan) and 2013 (Seoul, Korea). In addition, two well-organized review papers in this issue provide informative and comprehensive surveys of aesthetic curve and surface design in CAGD and knowledge structuring and logic reasoning in CAPP, respectively. They include rich lists of references which will help the readers to quickly gain an overview of the current status and future research directions of these fields. Finally, the editors sincerely thank all the authors and anonymous reviewers for their devoted work, as they made this special issue possible. We expect that it will encourage further research on advanced CAD, CAM, CAE, CAPP, and digital engineering systems.
Current status and perspective of CAD/CAM-produced resin composite crowns: a review of clinical effectiveness