We cordially invite you to attend the “International Symposium on Assembly and Manufacturing” (ISAM 2013), which will be held on July 30th – Aug 2th, 2013. In order to promote international cooperation and exchange in the field of assembly and manufacturing technologies, and to provide a forum for continuing scientific discussion, ISAM (formerly known as IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Task Planning) has been held at Ann Arbor, Michigan (2007), in Suwon, Korea (2009), and in Tampere, Finland (2011). Today we are welcoming you to beautiful and historic city of Xi’an.The Symposium aims at providing a forum for researchers and practitioners working on the diverse issues of assembly and manufacturing in various product sizes (from nano to macro), production scales (from workstation to global production network), and product life-cycle (from early stage product design to post-production). Authors are invited to submit papers for all aspects of theories, methodologies, applications, and case studies related to assembly and manufacturing in this context. We are confident that the ISAM 2013 will witness the passing of the valuable knowhow from our scientific consortium to the next generation of researchers, who will further advance our understanding of emerging paradigms in assembly, manufacturing and related ICT, and extend their applications in related fields. ISAM2013 sponsored by IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, CIRP, Chinese Mechanical Enginnering Society, National Natural Science Foundation of China, State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, and organizered by Xi'an Jiaotong University.