A belief is underlying an interest in the field of the computer-aided prediction of development of materials surface engineering, substantiated with numerous practical examples that the fundamental, current civilizational objectives can be achieved by developing material engineering. The producers of goods satisfying human needs have at their disposal practically an unlimited number of state-of-the-art engineering materials and the related material process technologies. To satisfy customer demands, engineering materials have to be designed and applied that, when undergoing appropriate engineering processes for formulating their geometric form and especially structure formation – ensuring the material’s appropriate physiochemical properties – will guarantee the expected functional uses of the products manufactured using them. It should be noted that the producer–client relations have substantially changed in the recent years as signified by a demand to deliver materials with the desired structure and physiochemical properties meeting functional requirements determined by a client’s expectations and usable functions of products (i.e., materials on demand). The rules of materials producers’ market have been clearly replaced by the customer market despite the fact that just a few years ago market products had been only manufactured of engineering materials with their chemical composition, structure, and properties, and even dimensions, absolutely imposed by manufacturers’ production timetable and by plans for a limited – by the nature of things – number of engineering materials. It is very common these days that product design, and, in consequence, the manufacture of functional products, is not connected with requirements set for chemical composition, structure, and properties of material cores, or actually a product or its element, but for their surface and, in fact, their surface layer. It is not reasonably substantiated in engineering calculations and real requirements to ensure the expected properties uniformly across the whole section of a product. The most general aim of such measures, more and more often employed in many industries, is to achieve a structure in the zone around the surface similar to a composite, and this, as a result of scientific and technological experiments lasting for many decades, has led to the development of multiple technologies of surface layer structure formation, deposition of coatings, including those consisting of many or even several hundred layers, and also to the production of surface graded materials. The tailoring of properties of different items to operational requirements is therefore accomplished through selecting appropriately the core material and the technologies ensuring its properties (e.g., thermal or thermochemical treatment) and by choosing at the same time the surface layer treatment technology. Scientific institutions around the globe are expressing their ongoing and intensifying interest in this field as well.
Foresight stands for overall actions aimed at selecting the most beneficial visions of future and at indicating the ways to implement the future, using the appropriate methods originating from organization and management science. Technology foresight consists of looking regularly, over a long-term prospective, into the future of science and technology, economy, and societies, in conjunction with an ability to select strategic technologies aimed at bringing substantial economic and social benefits, the specificity of which is illustrated by the technology foresight triangle (Fig. 1). Technology foresight is focussed on the priority innovative technologies, the implementation of which brings the highest added value, and, therefore, will contribute over a long term to a high statistical level of technologies implemented in industry. Multivariant strategies established under the technology foresight serving to describe alternative development paths and visions of future are to contribute in long term to sustainable development considering the fate and wellbeing of the future generations. The activities performed under the foresight research are concentrated around the externalization of knowledge based on the transformation of an implicit knowledge available to only experts, specializing in a given field, and into an explicit knowledge available to the widely understood public, which over a long period should lead to the strengthening of a knowledgeand innovation-based economy.

E-foresight (electronic foresight) is a process of foresight investigations pursued to identify the priority, innovative technologies and directions of strategic development with reference to a particular thematic area using the Internet. The concept of e-foresight (Dobrzan´ska-Danikiewicz 2011a) associated with the well known and commonly used notions of e-management, e-business, e-commerce, e-banking, e-logistics, e-services, e-administration, and e-education (Dobrzan´ska-Danikiewicz et al. 2010a) was developed during the practical performance of foresight investigations concerning materials surface engineering, as a result of scientific quests serving to harmonize, streamline, and modernize the process of the foresight studies pursued. The main driving force for implementing improvements was a broad scale of the studies planned for implementation.
A full overview of the contemporary treatment technologies decisive for the formation of the structure and properties of engineering materials surface layers (Dobrzan´ska-Danikiewicz and Lukaszkowicz 2010) reveals that over 500 specific technologies of surface treatment and their numerous technological variants have been conceived to date. Usually costly manufacturing equipment and the necessary industrial infrastructure with the average depreciation time of approx twenty years have to be used each time when a relevant technology is selected. A manager’s decisions are becoming vital in the context of selecting correctly a technology, including relevant decisions on the investments to be made, and such decisions, in the longer run, are crucial for the success or defeat of the enterprise managed by such a manager. For this reason, it is crucial for long-term economic development to identify the priority, innovative technologies, and their desired development with pinpointing a product for which they should be applied and also to determine the development trends of such engineering material properties and structure formation technologies and also the directions of scientific research in this area within the long-term timeframe of at least twenty years, and this is decisive for an economy’s competitiveness. Trial and error must not be used for making such important decisions, and this makes it necessary to apply in this area, optionally, a method of credible scientific research into the development prospects of science and technology. A new approach described in this chapter of the book is aided with a computer-aided methodological concept serving to handle this task.