This publication presents the latest innovations and achievements of academic communities on Decision Support Systems (DSS). These advances include theory systems, computer-aided methods, algorithms, techniques and applications related to supporting decision making. The aim is to develop approaches for applying information systems technology to increase the effectiveness of decision making in situations where the computer system can support and enhance human judgments in the performance of tasks that have elements which cannot be specified in advance. Also it is intended to improve ways of synthesizing and applying relevant work from resource disciplines to practical implementation of systems that enhance decision support capability.The resource disciplines include: information technology, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, decision theory, organizational theory, operations research and modeling. Researchers come from the Operational Research area but also from Decision Theory, Multicriteria Decision Making methodologies, Fuzzy sets and modeling tools. Based on the introduction of Information and Communication Technologies in organizations, the decisional process is evolving from a mono actor to a multi actor situation in which cooperation is a way to make the decision.

This book presents a collection of mathematical models that deals with the real scenario in the industries. The primary objective of this book is to explore various effective methods for inventory control and management using soft computing techniques. Inventory control and management is a very tedious task faced by all the organizations in any sector of the economy. It makes decisions for policies, activities, and procedures in order to make sure that the right amount of each item is held in stock at any time. Many industries suffer from indiscipline while ordering and production mismatch. It is essential to provide best ordering policy to control such kind of mismatch in the industries. All the mathematical model solutions are provided with the help of various soft computing optimization techniques to determine optimal ordering policy. This book is beneficial for practitioners, educators, and researchers. It is also helpful for retailers/managers for improving business functions and making more accurate and realistic decisions.

This book discusses systematic designs of stable adaptive fuzzy logic controllers employing hybridizations of Lyapunov strategy-based approaches/H theory-based approaches and contemporary stochastic optimization techniques. The text demonstrates how candidate stochastic optimization techniques like Particle swarm optimization (PSO), harmony search (HS) algorithms, covariance matrix adaptation (CMA) etc. can be utilized in conjunction with the Lyapunov theory/H theory to develop such hybrid control strategies. The goal of developing a series of such hybridization processes is to combine the strengths of both Lyapunov theory/H theory-based local search methods and stochastic optimization-based global search methods, so as to attain superior control algorithms that can simultaneously achieve desired asymptotic performance and provide improved transient responses. The book also demonstrates how these intelligent adaptive control algorithms can be effectively utilized in real-life applications such as in temperature control for air heater systems with transportation delay, vision-based navigation of mobile robots, intelligent control of robot manipulators etc.

This book discusses the parametric modeling, performance evaluation, design optimization and comparative study of the high-speed, parallel pick-and-place robots. It collects the modeling methodology, evaluation criteria and design guidelines for parallel PnP robots to provide a systematic analysis method for robotic developers. Furthermore, it gathers the research results previously scattered in many prestigious international journals and conference proceedings and methodically edits them and presents them in a unified form. The book is of interest to researchers, R&D engineers and graduate students in industrial parallel robotics who wish to learn the core principles, methods, algorithms, and applications.

This book provides a comprehensive guide to the state-of-the-art in cardiovascular computing and highlights novel directions and challenges in this constantly evolving multidisciplinary field. The topics covered span a wide range of methods and clinical applications of cardiovascular computing, including advanced technologies for the acquisition and analysis of signals and images, cardiovascular informatics, and mathematical and computational modeling.

During the last two decades, computer and information technologies have forced great changes in the ways businesses manage operations in meeting the desired quality of products and services, customer demands, competition, and other challenges.

Expansive growth and use of the Internet in recent years has led to computational networking and an increased use of e-collaborative technologies leading to many possibilities including collaboration of tasks from remote locations. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on E-Collaboration: Emerging Trends and Applications focuses on e-collaboration technologies that enable group-based interaction, and the impact that those technologies have on group work. A defining body of research, this reference addresses a range of e-collaboration topics including interdisciplinary perspectives on e-collaboration, and adaptation and creativity in e-collaboration.

Order affects the results you get: Different orders of presenting material can lead to qualitatively and quantitatively different learning outcomes. These differences occur in both natural and artificial learning systems. In Order to Learn shows how order effects are crucial in human learning, instructional design, machine learning, and both symbolic and connectionist cognitive models. Each chapter explains a different aspect of how the order in which material is presented can strongly influence what is learned by humans and theoretical models of learning in a variety of domains. In addition to data, models are provided that predict and describe order effects and analyze how and when they will occur. The introductory and concluding chapters compile suggestions for improving learning through better sequences of learning materials, including how to take advantage of order effects that encourage learning and how to avoid order effects that discourage learning. Each chapter also highlights questions that may inspire further research. Taken together, these chapters show how order effects in different areas can and do inform each other. In Order to Learn will be of interest to researchers and students in cognitive science, education, machine learning.

This book provides foundations for the understanding and design of computation-efficient algorithms and protocols for those interactions with environment, i.e., wireless communication systems. The book provides a systematic treatment of the theoretical foundation and algorithmic tools necessarily in the design of computation-efficient algorithms and protocols in stochastic scheduling. The problems addressed in the book are of both fundamental and practical importance. Target readers of the book are researchers and advanced-level engineering students interested in acquiring in-depth knowledge on the topic and on stochastic scheduling and their applications, both from theoretical and engineering perspective.

Space and time are inextricably linked. Reasoning about space often involves reasoning about change in spatial configurations. Qualitative spatial information theory encompasses spatial as well as temporal representation and reasoning. Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Representation and Reasoning: Trends and Future Directions is a contribution to the emerging discipline of qualitative spatial information theory within artificial intelligence. This collection of research covers both theory and application-centric research and provides a comprehensive perspective on the emerging area of qualitative spatio-temporal representation and reasoning. This revolutionary new field is increasingly becoming a core issue within mobile computing, GIS/spatial information systems, databases, computer vision as well as knowledge discovery and data mining.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third IFIP TC 12 International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Data Science, ICCIDS 2020, held in Chennai, India, in February 2020.The 19 revised full papers and 8 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: computational intelligence for text analysis; computational intelligence for image and video analysis; and data science.

This book gathers the proceedings of the Multidisciplinary International Conference of Research Applied to Defense and Security (MICRADS), held at the Eloy Alfaro Military Academy (ESMIL) in Quito, Ecuador, on May 13-15,2020. It covers a broad range of topics in systems, communication, and defense; strategy and political-administrative vision in defense; and engineering and technologies applied to defense. Given its scope, it offers a valuable resource for practitioners, researchers, and students alike.

This book is based on the authors' research on the stabilization and fault-tolerant control of batch processes, which are flourishing topics in the field of control system engineering. It introduces iterative learning control for linear/nonlinear single/multi-phase batch processes; iterative learning optimal guaranteed cost control; delay-dependent iterative learning control; and iterative learning fault-tolerant control for linear/nonlinear single/multi-phase batch processes. Providing important insights and useful methods and practical algorithms that can potentially be applied in batch process control and optimization, it is a valuable resource for researchers, scientists, and engineers in the field of process system engineering and control engineering.

This is an information science reference. Distance learning technologies have reshaped the diffusion of communication within the educational system. Within this expanding field, the possibilities for an interactive, cross-boundary education are endless.""Strategic Applications of Distance Learning Technologies"" provides tactical uses of distance education technologies to assist instructors and researchers in their quest to provide a progressive, alternative approach to traditional education techniques. This collection of advanced research incorporates global challenges and opportunities of technology integration while outlining strategies for distance learning within developing countries.

This book highlights the emerging field of intelligent computing and developing smart systems. It includes chapters discussing the outcome of challenging research related to distributed computing, smart machines and their security related research, and also covers next-generation communication techniques and the networking technologies that have the potential to build the future communication infrastructure. Bringing together computing, communications and other aspects of intelligent and smart computing, it contributes to developing a roadmap for future research on intelligent systems.

Computational intelligence is rapidly becoming an essential part of reliability engineering. This book offers a wide spectrum of viewpoints on the merger of technologies. Leading scientists share their insights and progress on reliability engineering techniques, suitable mathematical methods, and practical applications. Thought-provoking ideas are embedded in a solid scientific basis that contribute to the development the emerging field. This book is for anyone working on the most fundamental paradigm-shift in resilience engineering in decades. Scientists benefit from this book by gaining insight in the latest in the merger of reliability engineering and computational intelligence. Businesses and (IT) suppliers can find inspiration for the future, and reliability engineers can use the book to move closer to the cutting edge of technology.

This is the first of two volumes that together provide an overview of the latest advances in the generation and application of digital twins in bioprocess design and optimization.Both processes have undergone significant changes over the past few decades, moving from data-driven approaches into the 21st-century digitalization of the bioprocess industry. Moreover, the high demand for biotechnological products calls for efficient methods during research and development, as well as during tech transfer and routine manufacturing. In this regard, one promising tool is the use of digital twins, which offer a virtual representation of the bioprocess. They reflect the mechanistics of the biological system and the interactions between process parameters, key performance indicators and product quality attributes in the form of a mathematical process model. Furthermore, digital twins allow us to use computer-aided methods to gain an improved process understanding, to test and plan novel bioprocesses, and to efficiently monitor them. This book explains the mathematical structure of digital twins, their development and the model's respective parts, as well as concepts for the knowledge-driven generation and structural variability of digital twins. Covering fundamentals as well as applications, the two volumes offer the ideal introduction to the topic for researchers in academy and industry alike.

This book presents practical as well as conceptual insights into the latest trends, tools, techniques and methodologies of blockchains for the Internet of Things. The decentralised Internet of Things (IoT) not only reduces infrastructure costs, but also provides a standardised peer-to-peer communication model for billions of transactions. However, there are significant security challenges associated with peer-to-peer communication. The decentralised concept of blockchain technology ensures transparent interactions between different parties, which are more secure and reliable thanks to distributed ledger and proof-of-work consensus algorithms. Blockchains allow trustless, peer-to-peer communication and have already proven their worth in the world of financial services. The blockchain can be implanted in IoT systems to deal with the issues of scale, trustworthiness and decentralisation, allowing billions of devices to share the same network without the need for additional resources. This book discusses the latest tools and methodology and concepts in the decentralised Internet of Things. Each chapter presents an in-depth investigation of the potential of blockchains in the Internet of Things, addressing the state-of-the-art in and future perspectives of the decentralised Internet of Things. Further, industry experts, researchers and academicians share their ideas and experiences relating to frontier technologies, breakthrough and innovative solutions and applications.

This book discusses the use of efficient metaheuristic algorithms to solve diverse power system problems, providing an overview of the various aspects of metaheuristic methods to enable readers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the field and of conducting studies on specific metaheuristic algorithms related to power-system applications. By bridging the gap between recent metaheuristic techniques and novel power system methods that benefit from the convenience of metaheuristic methods, it offers power system practitioners who are not metaheuristic computation researchers insights into the techniques, which go beyond simple theoretical tools and have been adapted to solve important problems that commonly arise. On the other hand, members of the metaheuristic computation community learn how power engineering problems can be translated into optimization tasks, and it is also of interest to engineers and application developers. Further, since each chapter can be read independently, the relevant information can be quickly found. Power systems is a multidisciplinary field that addresses the multiple approaches used for design and analysis in areas ranging from signal processing, and electronics to computational intelligence, including the current trend of metaheuristic computation.

The author presents Probatio, a toolkit for building functional DMI (digital musical instruments) prototypes, artifacts in which gestural control and sound production are physically decoupled but digitally mapped. He uses the concept of instrumental inheritance, the application of gestural and/or structural components of existing instruments to generate ideas for new instruments. To support analysis and combination, he then leverages a traditional design method, the morphological chart, in which existing artifacts are split into parts, presented in a visual form and then recombined to produce new ideas. And finally he integrates the concept and the method in a concrete object, a physical prototyping toolkit for building functional DMI prototypes: Probatio. The author's evaluation of this modular system shows it reduces the time required to develop functional prototypes. The book is useful for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students in the areas of musical creativity and human-computer interaction, in particular those engaged in generating, communicating, and testing ideas in complex design spaces.

This book includes high-quality papers presented at the International Conference on Data Science and Management (ICDSM 2019), organised by the Gandhi Institute for Education and Technology, Bhubaneswar, from 22 to 23 February 2019. It features research in which data science is used to facilitate the decision-making process in various application areas, and also covers a wide range of learning methods and their applications in a number of learning problems. The empirical studies, theoretical analyses and comparisons to psychological phenomena described contribute to the development of products to meet market demands.

Web and Information Security consists of a collection of papers written by leading experts in the field that describe state-of-the-art topics pertaining to Web and information systems security. In particular, security for the semantic Web, privacy, security policy management and emerging topics such as secure semantic grids and secure multimedia systems are also discussed. As well as covering basic concepts of Web and information system security, this book provides new insights into the semantic Web field and its related security challenges. ""Web and Information Security"" is valuable as a reference book for senior undergraduate or graduate courses in information security which have special focuses on Web security. It is also useful for technologists, researchers, managers and developers who want to know more about emerging security technologies.

Talk to just about any Information Technology (IT) executive today and you're likely to hear the same complaint: "Even though we have invested millions of dollars each year in technical infrastructure and support, we don't get the results we expect." The focus of IT management over the past several decades has been on maximizing the benefit that comes from IT investments. Particular attention is paid to finding the right hardware, software, networks, and processes to allow IT to contribute to the bottom line of the business. And still, with all of this focus, IT organizations find themselves unable to meet the demands of their clients. Perhaps a shift in focus is needed. IT PEOPLE: Doing More With Less shifts the focus to the IT people. Because while it is right to focus on getting the hardware, software, networks, and processes right, people are the resources that ultimately make a difference in getting results and meeting the demands of clients. And since people costs are often the largest part of the IT budgets, and our focus has been elsewhere, it could be that a focus on IT people is long overdue. This book is intended for every IT professional (management and individual contributors) who faces the constant challenge of performing a big job with ever-shrinking departmental resources. Whether you are a manager or an individual technician, this book is for you. It will help you improve your ability to plan your work and, meet your commitments while being an effective political actor. Our aim in this book is to provide you with a tool that will not only help you deliver greater value to your organization, but do so in a way that provides a greater degree of job satisfaction andquality of life. IT PEOPLE: Doing More With Less is intended as a practical tool, not a theoretical book. The content of the book comes from the experiences of the authors, each of whom has spent years managing IT organizations and consulting with clients around the worl

This book proposes neural networks algorithms and advanced machine learning techniques for processing nonlinear dynamic signals such as audio, speech, financial signals, feedback loops, waveform generation, filtering, equalization, signals from arrays of sensors, and perturbations in the automatic control of industrial production processes. It also discusses the drastic changes in financial, economic, and work processes that are currently being experienced by the computational and engineering sciences community. Addresses key aspects, such as the integration of neural algorithms and procedures for the recognition, the analysis and detection of dynamic complex structures and the implementation of systems for discovering patterns in data, the book highlights the commonalities between computational intelligence (CI) and information and communications technologies (ICT) to promote transversal skills and sophisticated processing techniques. This book is a valuable resource for a. The academic research community b. The ICT market c. PhD students and early stage researchers d. Companies, research institutes e. Representatives from industry and standardization bodies