This book on constrained optimization is novel in that it fuses these themes: * use examples to introduce general ideas; * engage the student in spreadsheet computation; * survey the uses of constrained optimization;. * investigate game theory and nonlinear optimization, * link the subject to economic reasoning, and * present the requisite mathematics. Blending these themes makes constrained optimization more accessible and more valuable. It stimulates the student's interest, quickens the learning process, reveals connections to several academic and professional fields, and deepens the student's grasp of the relevant mathematics. The book is designed for use in courses that focus on the applications of constrained optimization, in courses that emphasize the theory, and in courses that link the subject to economics.

The non-Gaussianity in the primordial density fluctuations is a key feature to clarify the early Universe and it has been probed with the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) bispectrum. In recent years, we have treated the novel-type CMB bispectra, which originate from the vector- and tensor-mode perturbations and include the violation of the rotational or parity invariance. On the basis of our current works, this thesis provides the general formalism for the CMB bispectrum sourced by the non-Gaussianity in the scalar, vector and tensor-mode perturbations. Applying this formalism, we calculate the CMB bispectra from the two scalars and a graviton correlation and primordial magnetic fields, and then outline new constraints on these magnitudes. Furthermore, this formalism can be easily extended to the cases where the rotational or parity invariance is broken. We also compute the CMB bispectra from the scalar-mode non-Gaussianities with a preferred direction and the tensor-mode non-Gaussianities induced by the parity-violating Weyl cubic terms. Here, we show that these bispectra include unique signals, which any symmetry-invariant models can never produce.

Dynamics of Information Systems: Algorithmic Approaches presents recent developments and results found by participants of the Fourth International Conference on the Dynamics of Information Systems, which took place at the University of Florida, Gainesville FL, USA on February 20-22, 2012. The purpose of this conference was to bring together scientists and engineers from industry, government, and universities to exchange knowledge and results in a broad range of topics relevant to the theory and practice of the dynamics of information systems. Dynamics of Information plays an increasingly critical role in our society. The influence of information on social, biological, genetic, and military systems must be better understood to achieve large advances in the capability and understanding of these systems. Applications are widespread and include: detection of terrorist networks, design of highly efficient businesses, computer networks, quantum entanglement, genome modeling, multi-robotic systems, and industrial and manufacturing safety. The book contains state-of-the-art work on theory and practice relevant to the dynamics of information systems. It covers algorithmic approaches to numerical computations with infinite and infinitesimal numbers; presents important problems arising in service-oriented systems, such as dynamic composition and analysis of modern service-oriented information systems and estimation of customer service times on a rail network from GPS data; addresses the complexity of the problems arising in stochastic and distributed systems; and discusses modulating communication for improving multi-agent learning convergence. Network issues-in particular minimum-risk maximum-clique problems, vulnerability of sensor networks, influence diffusion, community detection, and link prediction in social network analysis, as well as a comparative analysis of algorithms for transmission network expansion planning-are described in later chapters.

This book is a continuation of the previous volumes of our series on Advanced Computational Intelligence Paradigms in Healthcare. The recent advances in computational intelligence paradigms have highlighted the need of intelligent systems in healthcare. This volume provides the reader a glimpse of the current state of the art in intelligent support system design in the field of healthcare. The book reports a sample of recent advances in: * Clinical Decision Support Systems * Rehabilitation Decision Support Systems * Technology Acceptance in Medical Decision Support Systems The book is directed to the researchers, professors, practitioner and students interested to design and develop intelligent decision support systems.

Analysis and Control of Boolean Networks presents a systematic new approach to the investigation of Boolean control networks. The fundamental tool in this approach is a novel matrix product called the semi-tensor product (STP). Using the STP, a logical function can be expressed as a conventional discrete-time linear system. In the light of this linear expression, certain major issues concerning Boolean network topology - fixed points, cycles, transient times and basins of attractors - can be easily revealed by a set of formulae. This framework renders the state-space approach to dynamic control systems applicable to Boolean control networks. The bilinear-systemic representation of a Boolean control network makes it possible to investigate basic control problems including controllability, observability, stabilization, disturbance decoupling etc.

Chemical Modelling: Applications and Theory comprises critical literature reviews of all aspects of molecular modelling. Molecular modelling in this context refers to modelliing the structure, properties and reactions of atoms, molecules and materials. Each chapter provides a selective review of recent literature, incorporating sufficient historical perspective for the non-specialist to gain an understanding. With chemical modelling covering such a wide range of subjects, this Specialist Periodical Report serves as the first port of call to any chemist, biochemist, materials scientist or molecular physicist needing to acquaint themselves with major developments in the area.

The book covers the state-of-the-art treatment in modelling and experimental investigation of the mechanical behaviour of cellular and porous materials. Starting from the continuum mechanical modelling, to the numerical simulation, several important questions related to applications such as the fracture and impact behaviour are covered.

The idea of modeling the behaviour of phenomena at multiple scales has become a useful tool in both pure and applied mathematics. Fractal-based techniques lie at the heart of this area, as fractals are inherently multiscale objects; they very often describe nonlinear phenomena better than traditional mathematical models. In many cases they have been used for solving inverse problems arising in models described by systems of differential equations and dynamical systems.

"Fractal-Based Methods in Analysis" draws together, for the first time in book form, methods and results from almost twenty years of research in this topic, including new viewpoints and results in many of the chapters. For each topic the theoretical framework is carefully explained using examples and applications.

The second chapter on basic iterated function systems theory is designed to be used as the basis for a course and includes many exercises. This chapter, along with the three background appendices on topological and metric spaces, measure theory, and basic results from set-valued analysis, make the book suitable for self-study or as a source book for a graduate course. The other chapters illustrate many extensions and applications of fractal-based methods to different areas. This book is intended for graduate students and researchers in applied mathematics, engineering and social sciences.

Herb Kunze is a professor of mathematics at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Davide La Torre is an associate professor of mathematics in the Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods of the University of Milan. Franklin Mendivil is a professor of mathematics at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. Edward Vrscay is a professor in the department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. The major focus of their research is on fractals and the applications of fractals.

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KES International (KES) is a worldwide organisation that provides a professional community and association for researchers, originally in the discipline of Knowledge Based and Intelligent Engineering Systems, but now extending into other related areas. Through this, KES provides its members with opportunities for publication and beneficial interaction. The focus of KES is research and technology transfer in the area of Intelligent S- tems, i.e. computer-based software systems that operate in a manner analogous to the human brain, in order to perform advanced tasks. Recently KES has started to extend its area of interest to encompass the contribution that intelligent systems can make to sustainability and renewable energy, and also the knowledge transfer, innovation and enterprise agenda. Involving several thousand researchers, managers and engineers drawn from u- versities and companies world-wide, KES is in an excellent position to facilitate - ternational research co-operation and generate synergy in the area of artificial intel- gence applied to real-world 'Smart' systems and the underlying related theory. The KES annual conference covers a broad spectrum of intelligent systems topics and attracts several hundred delegates from a range of countries round the world. KES also organises symposia on specific technical topics, for example, Agent and Multi Agent Systems, Intelligent Decision Technologies, Intelligent Interactive M- timedia Systems and Services, Sustainability in Energy and Buildings and Innovations through Knowledge Transfer. KES is responsible for two peer-reviewed journals, the International Journal of Knowledge based and Intelligent Engineering Systems, and Intelligent Decision Technologies: an International Journal.

The systematic study of existence, uniqueness, and properties of solutions to stochastic differential equations in infinite dimensions arising from practical problems characterizes this volume that is intended for graduate students and for pure and applied mathematicians, physicists, engineers, professionals working with mathematical models of finance. Major methods include compactness, coercivity, monotonicity, in a variety of set-ups. The authors emphasize the fundamental work of Gikhman and Skorokhod on the existence and uniqueness of solutions to stochastic differential equations and present its extension to infinite dimension. They also generalize the work of Khasminskii on stability and stationary distributions of solutions. New results, applications, and examples of stochastic partial differential equations are included. This clear and detailed presentation gives the basics of the infinite dimensional version of the classic books of Gikhman and Skorokhod and of Khasminskii in one concise volume that covers the main topics in infinite dimensional stochastic PDE's. By appropriate selection of material, the volume can be adapted for a 1- or 2-semester course, and can prepare the reader for research in this rapidly expanding area.

The book introduces possibly the most compact, simple and physically understandable tool that can describe, explain, predict and design the widest set of phenomena in time-variant and nonlinear oscillations. The phenomena described include parametric resonances, combined resonances, instability of forced oscillations, synchronization, distributed parameter oscillation and flatter, parametric oscillation control, robustness of oscillations and many others. Although the realm of nonlinear oscillations is enormous, the book relies on the concept of minimum knowledge for maximum understanding. This unique tool is the method of stationarization, or one frequency approximation of parametric resonance problem analysis in linear time-variant dynamic systems. The book shows how this can explain periodic motion stability in stationary nonlinear dynamic systems, and reveals the link between the harmonic stationarization coefficients and describing functions. As such, the book speaks the language of control: transfer functions, frequency response, Nyquist plot, stability margins, etc. An understanding of the physics of stability loss is the basis for the design of new oscillation control methods for, several of which are presented in the book. These and all the other findings are illustrated by numerical examples, which can be easily reproduced by readers equipped with a basic simulation package like MATLAB with Simulink. The book offers a simple tool for all those travelling through the world of oscillations, helping them discover its hidden beauty. Researchers can use the method to uncover unknown aspects, and as a reference to compare it with other, for example, abstract mathematical means. Further, it provides engineers with a minimalistic but powerful instrument based on physically measurable variables to analyze and design oscillatory systems.

Most networks and databases that humans have to deal with contain large, albeit finite number of units. Their structure, for maintaining functional consistency of the components, is essentially not random and calls for a precise quantitative description of relations between nodes (or data units) and all network components. This book is an introduction, for both graduate students and newcomers to the field, to the theory of graphs and random walks on such graphs. The methods based on random walks and diffusions for exploring the structure of finite connected graphs and databases are reviewed (Markov chain analysis). This provides the necessary basis for consistently discussing a number of applications such diverse as electric resistance networks, estimation of land prices, urban planning, linguistic databases, music, and gene expression regulatory networks.

This volume has been divided into two parts: Geometry and Applications. The geometry portion of the book relates primarily to geometric flows, laminations, integral formulae, geometry of vector fields on Lie groups and osculation; the articles in the applications portion concern some particular problems of the theory of dynamical systems, including mathematical problems of liquid flows and a study of cycles for non-dynamical systems.

This Work is based on the second international workshop entitled "Geometry and Symbolic Computations," held on May 15-18, 2013 at the University of Haifa and is dedicated to modeling (using symbolic calculations) in differential geometry and its applications in fields such as computer science, tomography and mechanics. It is intended to create a forum for students and researchers in pure and applied geometry to promote discussion of modern state-of-the-art in geometric modeling using symbolic programs such as Maple and Mathematica(r), as well as presentation of new results."

This unified volume is a collection of invited chapters presenting recent developments in the field of data analysis, with applications to reliability and inference, data mining, bioinformatics, lifetime data, and neural networks. The book is a useful reference for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in statistics, mathematics, engineering, economics, social science, bioengineering, and bioscience.

This book presents recent developments in our systematic studies of hydrodynamics and heat and mass transfer in laminar free convection, accelerating film boiling and condensation of Newtonian fluids, as well as accelerating film flow of non-Newtonian power-law fluids (FFNF). These new developments provided in this book are (i) novel system of analysis models based on the developed New Similarity Analysis Method; (ii) a system of advanced methods for treatment of gas temperature- dependent physical properties, and liquid temperature- dependent physical properties; (iii) the organically combined models of the governing mathematical models with those on treatment model of variable physical properties; (iv) rigorous approach of overcoming a challenge on accurate solution of three-point boundary value problem related to two-phase film boiling and condensation; and (v) A pseudo-similarity method of dealing with thermal boundary layer of FFNF for greatly simplifies the heat-transfer analysis and numerical calculation. A system of practical application equations on heat and mass transfer are provided in each chapter, which are formulated based on the rigorous numerical solutions with consideration of variable physical properties. In addition, in the second edition, other new research developments are further included on resolving an even big challenge associated with investigations of laminar free film condensation of vapour-gas mixture. They involve the novel methods for treatment of concentration- and temperature- dependent physical properties of vapour-gas mixture, and for rigorous solution of interfacial vapour saturation temperature, which have lead to rigorous analysis and calculation results on two-phase film flow velocity, temperature, and concentration fields, as well as condensate heat and mass transfer.

This volume is dedicated to Harold Widom, a distinguished mathematician and renowned expert in the area of Toeplitz, Wiener-Hopf and pseudodifferential operators, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The book opens with biographical material and a list of the mathematician's publications, this being followed by two papers based on Toeplitz lectures which he delivered at Tel Aviv University in March, 1993. The rest of the book consists of a selection of papers containing some recent achievements in the following areas: SzegA-Widom asymptotic formulas for determinants of finite sections of Toeplitz matrices and their generalizations, the Fisher-Hartwig conjecture, random matrices, analysis of kernels of Toeplitz matrices, projectional methods and eigenvalue distribution for Toeplitz matrices, the Fredholm theory for convolution type operators, the Nehari interpolation problem with generalizations and applications, and Toeplitz-Hausdorff type theorems. The book will appeal to a wide audience of pure and applied mathematicians.

This book describes a promising approach to problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics, including the measurement problem. The dynamics of ensembles on configuration space is shown here to be a valuable tool for unifying the formalisms of classical and quantum mechanics, for deriving and extending the latter in various ways, and for addressing the quantum measurement problem. A description of physical systems by means of ensembles on configuration space can be introduced at a very fundamental level: the basic building blocks are a configuration space, probabilities, and Hamiltonian equations of motion for the probabilities. The formalism can describe both classical and quantum systems, and their thermodynamics, with the main difference being the choice of ensemble Hamiltonian. Furthermore, there is a natural way of introducing ensemble Hamiltonians that describe the evolution of hybrid systems; i.e., interacting systems that have distinct classical and quantum sectors, allowing for consistent descriptions of quantum systems interacting with classical measurement devices and quantum matter fields interacting gravitationally with a classical spacetime.

This book contains selected papers of the 11th OpenFOAM (R) Workshop that was held in Guimaraes, Portugal, June 26 - 30, 2016. The 11th OpenFOAM (R) Workshop had more than 140 technical/scientific presentations and 30 courses, and was attended by circa 300 individuals, representing 180 institutions and 30 countries, from all continents. The OpenFOAM (R) Workshop provided a forum for researchers, industrial users, software developers, consultants and academics working with OpenFOAM (R) technology. The central part of the Workshop was the two-day conference, where presentations and posters on industrial applications and academic research were shown. OpenFOAM (R) (Open Source Field Operation and Manipulation) is a free, open source computational toolbox that has a larger user base across most areas of engineering and science, from both commercial and academic organizations. As a technology, OpenFOAM (R) provides an extensive range of features to solve anything from complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to solid dynamics and electromagnetics, among several others. Additionally, the OpenFOAM technology offers complete freedom to customize and extend its functionalities.

This book for the first time examines periodic motions to chaos in time-delay systems, which exist extensively in engineering. For a long time, the stability of time-delay systems at equilibrium has been of great interest from the Lyapunov theory-based methods, where one cannot achieve the ideal results. Thus, time-delay discretization in time-delay systems was used for the stability of these systems. In this volume, Dr. Luo presents an accurate method based on the finite Fourier series to determine periodic motions in nonlinear time-delay systems. The stability and bifurcation of periodic motions are determined by the time-delayed system of coefficients in the Fourier series and the method for nonlinear time-delay systems is equivalent to the Laplace transformation method for linear time-delay systems.

This book contains a collection of recent advanced contributions in the field of nonlinear dynamics and synchronization, including selected applications in the area of theoretical electrical engineering. The present book is divided into twenty-one chapters grouped in five parts. The first part focuses on theoretical issues related to chaos and synchronization and their potential applications in mechanics, transportation, communication and security. The second part handles dynamic systems modelling and simulation with special applications to real physical systems and phenomena. The third part discusses some fundamentals of electromagnetics (EM) and addresses the modelling and simulation in some real physical electromagnetic scenarios. The fourth part mainly addresses stability concerns. Finally, the last part assembles some sample applications in the area of optimization, data mining, pattern recognition and image processing.

Mathematical optimization encompasses both a rich and rapidly evolving body of fundamental theory, and a variety of exciting applications in science and engineering. The present book contains a careful selection of articles on recent advances in optimization theory, numerical methods, and their applications in engineering. It features in particular new methods and applications in the fields of optimal control, PDE-constrained optimization, nonlinear optimization, and convex optimization. The authors of this volume took part in the 14th Belgian-French-German Conference on Optimization (BFG09) organized in Leuven, Belgium, on September 14-18, 2009. The volume contains a selection of reviewed articles contributed by the conference speakers as well as three survey articles by plenary speakers and two papers authored by the winners of the best talk and best poster prizes awarded at BFG09. Researchers and graduate students in applied mathematics, computer science, and many branches of engineering will find in this book an interesting and useful collection of recent ideas on the methods and applications of optimization.

Within our knowledge, the series of the International Conference on Cognitive Neurodynamics (ICCN) is the only conference series dedicating to cognitive neurodynamics. This volume is the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Cognitive Neurodynamics held in 2009, which reviews the progress in this field since the 1st ICCN -2007. The topics include: Neural coding and realistic neural network dynamics, Neural population dynamics, Firing Oscillations and Patterns in Neuronal Networks, Brain imaging, EEG, MEG, Sensory and Motor Dynamics, Global cognitive function, Multi-scalar Neurodynamics - from Physiology to Systems Theory, Neural computing, Emerging Technologies for Brain Computer Interfaces, Neural dynamics of brain disorders.

Nonlinear Modelling of High Frequency Financial Time Series Edited by Christian Dunis and Bin Zhou In the competitive and risky environment of today's financial markets, daily prices and models based upon low frequency price series data do not provide the level of accuracy required by traders and a growing number of risk managers. To improve results, more and more researchers and practitioners are turning to high frequency data. Nonlinear Modelling of High Frequency Financial Time Series presents the latest developments and views of leading international researchers and market practitioners, in modelling high frequency data in finance. Combining both nonlinear modelling and intraday data for financial markets, the editors provide a fascinating foray into this extremely popular discipline. This book evolves around four major themes. The first introductory section focuses on high frequency financial data. The second part examines the exact nature of the time series considered: several linearity tests are presented and applied and their modelling implications assessed. The third and fourth parts are dedicated to modelling and forecasting these financial time series.

This book presents up-to-date results on abstract evolution equations and differential inclusions in infinite dimensional spaces. It covers equations with time delay and with impulses, and complements the existing literature in functional differential equations and inclusions. The exposition is devoted to both local and global mild solutions for some classes of functional differential evolution equations and inclusions, and other densely and non-densely defined functional differential equations and inclusions in separable Banach spaces or in Frechet spaces. The tools used include classical fixed points theorems and the measure-of non-compactness, and each chapter concludes with a section devoted to notes and bibliographical remarks. This monograph is particularly useful for researchers and graduate students studying pure and applied mathematics, engineering, biology and all other applied sciences.