Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude …
For the enriching research of Nam Pyo Shu and Genichi Taguchi. Their works are, without a doubt, the fundamental pillar on which I built the discourse presented in this book. Their contributions give meaning to the concept of ‘best’ in engineering, and serve as a unifying thread through the different chapters. Thanks to them, I took on the challenge of seeking objectivity in a field that traditionally suffers from a lack of it: the definition of the best engineering design process.
To all the professors at the School of Aeronautical Engineering at the Technical University of Madrid, and most especially those who had me as a student. Thanks to them, I received the necessary training to seek precision and rigor in the reflections on which engineering is based. I am also very grateful to all of my students because, thanks to their questions, I have been forced to find better answers. And thanks to their continuous encouragement, I have found the necessary strength to continue this search even when other tasks might have seemed more pressing.
To Alfonso Martínez Fernández and Fernando de la Iglesia Moreno for trusting in my proposals and giving me encouragement, good advice, and support from ALTRAN Technologies. I am doubly grateful because they managed to redirect my ideas without destroying them, while also having the patience to watch them grow.
To Massimo Bandecchi for providing me with access to the charts produced through his work in concurrent engineering, taken from the European Space Agency.
To David Howie, Mike Wood and Beatriz Sánchez Barba for giving me access to the illustration of the beautiful Trent 500 engine by Rolls-Royce.
To Juan Manuel Tizón Pulido, Joan Bruno Rodríguez Pastor and Luis García Rodríguez because their comments, reflections, questions and advice helped me to polish the way some ideas are presented in the book.
To Tania Michelle Tate for translating the text, and accompanying me as the original Spanish manuscript was transformed into the final version that is this book; and also for her patience when some of the finished chapters underwent drastic modifications.
Finally, to the editors and other staff at Chandos Publishing House for their magnificent work.