Production of aircraft structures

lndustrial production in times of world-wide competition faces challenging demands in view of quality as weil as of cost. Consequently, production engineering research focuses on improving both production technologies as weil as production systems. However, to promote the successful industrial application of latest developments, a forum for discussion and dissemination is required. Consequently, The Bremen Production Days have been installed at the University of Bremen. The idea behind The Bremen Production Days is to combine a conference which is focused on basic research with a conference focused on an application field. ln 2007, one of the conferences featured in the framewerk ofThe Bremen Production was the APT'07 (Applied Production Technology), the proceedings of which you are holding in your hands. This conference dealt with the wide area of recent advances concerning production aspects for aircraft structures. Aside from product safety and reliability, time-to-market and delivery reliability are of crucial importance in today's aircraft industries. Consequently, with increasing complexity of aircraft structures, there is a need for efficient production processes guaranteeing for highest product quality. The APT'07 with nearly 40 papers presented in 6 sessions demonstrated the international as weil as the local interest in the dynamic development of this field of production engineering. We would like to thank all members of the Conference and the lndustrial Committee for their support in attracting contributions. Furthermore, special thanks shall be extended to Airbus, pro-beam and Centr-AI for taking over sponsorship of this event. Finally, we would like to thank all those many who have contributed to APT'07 „behind the curtain“. Of these, Ms Heike Weers, who has assembled all the papers for the proceedings and cared for all registration affairs as weil as the thousands of little, but important things associated with such a large event should be especially acknowledged.