Introducing a fundamental approach to more balanced automation in manufacturing, this work discusses the changes in focus imposed by balanced automation and offers human-centred solutions for design frameworks, together with many implementation strategies. It covers the key areas of advanced architectures, methods and techniques for modelling, evaluation and quality management of manufacturing systems, implementation of legacy systems and migration strategies, information integration architectures for extended enterprises, industrial experiences of a human-centered approach automation, and balanced automation information modelling. The book is based on the selected proceedings of the "Second IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Architectures and Design Methods for Balanced Automation Systems", sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing held in Portugal in June 1996. It should be of interest to engineers, EDP managers, research and development personnel, senior undergraduate and undergraduate level students in CIM, production mangagement and automation systems.