Manufacturing contributes significantly to modern civilization and creates momentum that drives today"s economy. Much research work has been devoted to improving manufactured product quality and manufacturing process efficiency for many decades. Thanks to recent advances in computer and network technologies, sensors, control systems and manufacturing machines, manufacturing research has progressed to a new level. In addition, new research areas in manufacturing are emerging to address problems encountered in the evolving manufacturing environment, such as the increasing business practice of globalisation and outsourcing. This dedicated research journal has been established to report state-of-the-art and new developments in modern manufacturing research.