Computational Textile Edited by Xianyi Zeng, Yi Li Da Ruan and Ludovic Koehl

Editors’ Preface
In advanced countries as well as developing countries, the textile and garment industry still plays an important role in economy, in terms of production and employment. However, there exist many barriers in this industrial field that are pressing companies to face the following competitive challenges:

• Shorter product life cycles: distributors and consumers are looking for more variety and personalization.
• Lack of flexibility in the supply chain.
• Cost reduction: retailers do not want to lose their sales margins which generates a pressure to compete for cheaper prices on products.
• Homogeneity need: the lack of integration, the heterogeneity and the lack of standards is a chronic weakness of the textile and garment industry.
• Consumers demand more comfortable textile and apparel products as casualization becomes a global trend over the decades.
• Biofunctional performance of textile devices and apparel products becomes critical area of concerns as more and more consumers pay attention to making healthy lifestyles.

Under this challenging economic pressure, there is a strong need to develop new methods in order to optimize the quality of textile products and textile management. Information technology, especially computational techniques can play an important role in this optimization.

Since 1950’s, computational techniques have been widely applied in textile industry and garment industry for process and materials’ structure modeling, simulation and control, optimization of product quality, product design, textile market forecasting, and production management. The related computational techniques include classical methods such as statistics, differential equations, classical signal and image processing (time series analysis and frequency analysis) and statistical pattern recognition, and intelligent techniques such as soft computing and data mining. Classical methods are essentially based on formalization of physical laws and analysis of measured numerical data while intelligent methods often deal with uncertainty and imprecision related to human knowledge on products and processes and linguistic data analysis. The selection of specific computational techniques is strongly related to the nature of the problem of interest.

In general, an optimal solution to a complex textile problem can be found by combining several complementary techniques in a suitable way.

This edited book reports recent research results and provides a state-ofthe- art on computational techniques in textile and garment applications. The main objective of this book is to gather a peer-reviewed collection of high quality contributions in the relevant topic areas. Textile engineers in companies and technical centres as well as applied researchers and research students working on different textile topics can benefit from this book. The contributions of this book are mainly extracted from the special sessions on textile of the 17th IMACS Congress (IMACS’2005), held in

Paris in July 2005. The following criteria have been used in screening the chapters:

• Quality and originality in methodology,
• Application oriented papers exhibiting originality with reasonable theory involved,
• Relevance to computational techniques and textile industrial/engineering applications.

This book collects a number of representative applications of computational techniques in textile and garment industry. These applications cover the following issues:

• Textile quality assessment by image analysis,
• Modeling and simulation of textile structures,
• Computer aided garment design,
• Computerized textile management and textile Supply Chain,
• Textile quality subjective and objective evaluation;
• Computational thermal bioengineering of textiles and clothing;
• Computational biomechanical engineering of textiles an clothing.

The volume starts with an introduction chapter, entitled “From biological macromolecules to drape of clothing: 50 years of computing for tex tiles” and written by Prof. J.W.S. Hearle of University of Manchester. In this chapter, the author presented an overview of computing techniques (software and hardware) in various textile applications, including modelling of fibre, yarn and textile structure, modelling of textile mechanics, modelling of fabric drape, and textile and garment CAD.

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