Our purpose in writing this book was two-fold. First, we wanted to compile a chronology of the research in the field of mixed-mode simulation over the last ten to fifteen years. A substantial amount of work was done during this period of time but most of it was published in archival form in Masters theses and Ph. D. dissertations. Since the interest in mixed-mode simulation is growing, and a thorough review of the state-of-the-art in the area was not readily available, we thought it appropriate to publish the information in the form of a book. Secondly, we wanted to provide enough information to the reader so that a proto type mixed-mode simulator could be developed using the algorithms in this book. The SPLICE family of programs is based on the algorithms and techniques described in this book and so it can also serve as docu mentation for these programs. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to dedicate this book to Prof. D. O. Peder son for inspiring this research work and for providing many years of support and encouragement The authors enjoyed many fruitful discus sions and collaborations with Jim Kleckner, Young Kim, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, and Jacob White, and we thank them for their contributions. We also thank the countless others who participated in the research work and read early versions of this book. Lillian Beck provided many useful suggestions to improve the manuscript. Yun cheng Ju did the artwork for the illustrations."

This book describes a new type of computer aided VLSI design tool, called a VLSI System Planning, that is meant to aid designers dur ing the early, or conceptual, state of design. During this stage of design, the objective is to define a general design plan, or approach, that is likely to result in an efficient implementation satisfying the initial specifications, or to determine that the initial specifications are not realizable. A design plan is a collection of high level design decisions. As an example, the conceptual design of digital filters involves choosing the type of algorithm to implement (e. g. , finite impulse response or infinite impulse response), the type of polyno mial approximation (e. g. , Equiripple or Chebyshev), the fabrication technology (e. g. , CMOS or BiCMOS), and so on. Once a particu lar design plan is chosen, the detailed design phase can begin. It is during this phase that various synthesis, simulation, layout, and test activities occur to refine the conceptual design, gradually filling more detail until the design is finally realized. The principal advantage of VLSI System Planning is that the increasingly expensive resources of the detailed design process are more efficiently managed. Costly redesigns are minimized because the detailed design process is guided by a more credible, consistent, and correct design plan.

Machine Vision technology is becoming an indispensible part of the manufacturing industry. Biomedical and scientific applications of machine vision and imaging are becoming more and more sophisticated, and new applications continue to emerge. This book gives an overview of ongoing research in machine vision and presents the key issues of scientific and practical interest. A selected board of experts from the US, Japan and Europe provides an insight into some of the latest work done on machine vision systems and appliccations.

Hardware Component Modeling highlights the current status of the modeling of electronic components. It includes contributions from many of the leading researchers and practitioners in the field. The contents focus on four important topics. Standards: Three chapters describe current developments in employing standards for the use of component libraries. A major part of these chapters provides an excellent introduction to VITAL (an IEEE standard), its application and some of the issues in using and implementing it. There are, however, other standards with a role to play and these are also covered. Data Types: One chapter describes the latest techniques for using data types in modeling and simulation. Model Generation: One chapter describes a model generator for reusable component models and another describes a generator which takes actual physical data as its source and generates a functional model. Quality Assurance: Two chapters are devoted to improving the quality of models. One introduces a method for quantifying aspects of model quality and the other introduces quality concepts which can lead to an increase in model value through reuse and robustness.Hardware Component Modeling is a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners involved in the process of modeling electronic components.

In the last few years CMOS technology has become increas ingly dominant for realizing Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits. The popularity of this technology is due to its high den sity and low power requirement. The ability to realize very com plex circuits on a single chip has brought about a revolution in the world of electronics and computers. However, the rapid advance ments in this area pose many new problems in the area of testing. Testing has become a very time-consuming process. In order to ease the burden of testing, many schemes for designing the circuit for improved testability have been presented. These design for testability techniques have begun to catch the attention of chip manufacturers. The trend is towards placing increased emphasis on these techniques. Another byproduct of the increase in the complexity of chips is their higher susceptibility to faults. In order to take care of this problem, we need to build fault-tolerant systems. The area of fault-tolerant computing has steadily gained in importance. Today many universities offer courses in the areas of digital system testing and fault-tolerant computing. Due to the impor tance of CMOS technology, a significant portion of these courses may be devoted to CMOS testing. This book has been written as a reference text for such courses offered at the senior or graduate level. Familiarity with logic design and switching theory is assumed. The book should also prove to be useful to professionals working in the semiconductor industry."

In system design, generation of high-level abstract models that can be closely associated with evolving lower-level models provides designers with the ability to incrementally test' an evolving design against a model of a specification. Such high-level models may deal with areas such as performance, reliability, availability, maintainability, and system safety. Abstract models also allow exploration of the hardware versus software design space in an incremental fashion as a fuller, detailed design unfolds, leaving behind the old practice of hardware-software binding too early in the design process. Such models may also allow the inclusion of non-functional aspects of design (e.g. space, power, heat) in a simulatable information model dealing with the system's operation. This book addresses Model Generation and Application specifically in the following domains: Specification modeling (linking object/data modeling, behavior modeling, and activity modeling). Operational specification modeling (modeling the way the system is supposed to operate - from a user's viewpoint). Linking non-functional parameters with specification models. Hybrid modeling (linking performance and functional elements). Application of high-level modeling to hardware/software approaches. Mathematical analysis techniques related to the modeling approaches. Reliability modeling. Applications of High Level Modeling. Reducing High Level Modeling to Practice. High-Level System Modeling: Specification and Design Methodologies describes the latest research and practice in the modeling of electronic systems and as such is an important update for all researchers, design engineers and technical managers working in design automation and circuit design.

Wireless networking enables two or more computers to communicate using standard network protocols without network cables. Since their emergence in the 1970s, wireless networks have become increasingly pop ular in the computing industry. In the past decade, wireless networks have enabled true mobility. There are currently two versions of mobile wireless networks. An infrastructure network contains a wired backbone with the last hop being wireless. The cellular phone system is an exam ple of an infrastructure network. A multihop ad hoc wireless network has no infrastructure and is thus entirely wireless. A wireless sensor network is an example of a multihop ad hoc wireless network. Ad hoc wireless networking is a technique to support robust and ef ficient operation in mobile wireless networks by incorporating routing functionality into mobile hosts. This technique will be used to realize the dream of "anywhere and anytime computing," which is termed mo bile computing. Mobile computing is a new paradigm of computing in which users carrying portable devices have access to shared infrastruc ture in any location at any time. Mobile computing is a very challenging topic for scientists in computer science and electrical engineering. The representative system for ad hoc wireless networking is called MANET, an acronym for "Mobile Ad hoc NETworks." MANET is an autonomous system consisting of mobile hosts connected by wireless links which can be quickly deployed."

Models in system design follow the general tendency in electronics in terms of size, complexity and difficulty of maintenance. While a model should be a manageable representation of a system, this increasing complexity sometimes forces current CAD-tool designers and model writers to apply modeling techniques to the model itself. Model writers are interested in instrumenting their model, so as to extract critical information before the model is complete. CAD tools designers use internal representations of the design at various stages. The complexity has also led CAD-tool developers to develop formal tools, theories and methods to improve relevance, completeness and consistency of those internal representations. Information modeling involves the representation of objects, their properties and relationships. Performance Modeling When it comes to design choices and trade-offs, performance is generally the final key. However performance estimations have to be extracted at a very early stage in the system design. Performance modeling concerns the set of tools and techniques that allow or help the designer to capture metrics relating to future architectures. Performance modeling encompasses the whole system, including software modeling. It has a strong impact on all levels of design choices, from hardware/software partitioning to the final layout. Information Modeling Specification and formalism have in the past traditionally played little part in the design and development of EDA systems, their support environments, languages and processes. Instead, EDA system developers and EDA system users have seemed to be content to operate within environments that are often extremely complex and may be poorly tested and understood. This situation has now begun to change with the increasing use of techniques drawn from the domains of formal specification and database design. This section of this volume addresses aspects of the techniques being used. In particular, it considers a specific formalism, called information modeling, which has gained increasing acceptance recently and is now a key part of many of the proposals in the EDA Standards Roadmap, which promises to be of significance to the EDA industry. In addition, the section looks at an example of a design system from the point of view of its underlying understanding of the design process rather than through a consideration of particular CAD algorithms. Meta-Modeling: Performance and Information Modeling contains papers describing the very latest techniques used in meta-modeling. It will be a valuable text for researchers, practitioners and students involved in Electronic Design Automation.

Theory and practice of tolerances are very important for designing and manufacturing engineering artifacts on a rational basis. Tolerance specifies a degree of "discrepancy" between an idealized object and its physical realization. Such discrepancy inevitably comes into our product realization processes because of practical cost consideration or our inability to fully control manufacturing processes. Major product and production characteristics which are affected by tolerances are product quality and cost. For achieving high precision machines tight tolerance specification is necessary, but this will normally increase product cost. In order to optimally compromise the conflicting requirements of quality and cost, it is essential to take into account of the total product life cycle throughout product planning, design, manufacturing, maintenance and recycling. For example, in order to construct durable products under severe working conditions, low sensitivity of product functionality with respect to tolerances is required. In future, re-use of components or parts will become important, and tolerance synthesis with respect to this aspect will be an interesting future research topics.

The switching net.work is an important. classic research area in t.ele- communication and comput.er net.works. It.s import.ancc st.ems from both theory and practice. In fact, some open problems, such as Benes conjec- ture on shuffle-exchange networks and Chung-Rmis conjecture on multi- rate rearrangeability, still attract many researchers and the further de- velopment in optical networks requires advanced technology in optical switching networks. In 1997, we had a workshop in switching networks held in NSF Sci- ence and Technology Center in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS), at Princeton University. This workshop was very successful. Many participants wished to have a similar activity every two or three years. This book is a result of such a wish. We are putting together SOllle important developments in this area during last. several years, including articles ill fault-tolerance, rearrang{~ability. non- blocking, optical networks. random permutation generat.ioll. and layout complexity. SOlllC of thos(~ art ides are research papers alld SOIllC an' sur- veys. All articles were reviewed. We would like to uWlItioll two special problems studied in those articles.

The area of computer graphics is characterized by rapid evolution. New techniques in hardware and software developments, e. g., new rendering methods, have led to new ap plications and broader acceptance of graphics in fields such as scientific visualization, multi-media applications, computer aided design, and virtual reality systems. The evolving functionality and the growing complexity of graphics algorithms and sys tems make it more difficult for the application programmer to take full advantage of these systems. Conventional programming methods are no longer suited to manage the increasing complexity, so new programming paradigms and system architectures are re quired. One important step in this direction is the introduction and use of object-oriented methods. Intuition teils us that visible graphical entities are objects, and experience has indeed shown that object-oriented software techniques are quite useful for graphics. The expressiveness of object-oriented languages compared to pure procedurallanguages gives the graphics application programmer much better support when transforming his mental intentions into computer code. Moreover, object-oriented software development is a, weil founded technology, allowing software to be built from reusable and extensible compo nents. This book contains selected, reviewed and thoroughly revised vers ions of papers submit ted to and presented at the Fourth Eurographies Workshops on Object-Oriented Graphics, held on May 9-11, 1994 in Sintra, Portugal."

Motivation for this Book Ontologies have received increasing attention over the last two decades. Their roots can be traced back to the ancient philosophers, who were interested in a c- ceptualization of the world. In the more recent past, ontologies and ontological engineering have evolved in computer science, building on various roots such as logics, knowledge representation, information modeling and management, and (knowledge-based) information systems. Most recently, largely driven by the next generation internet, the so-called Semantic Web, ontological software engineering has developed into a scientific field of its own, which puts particular emphasis on the theoretical foundations of representation and reasoning, and on the methods and tools required for building ontology-based software applications in diverse domains. Though this field is largely dominated by computer science, close re- tionships have been established with its diverse areas of application, where - searchers are interested in exploiting the results of ontological software engine- ing, particularly to build large knowledge-intensive applications at high productivity and low maintenance effort. Consequently, a large number of scientific papers and monographs have been p- lished in the very recent past dealing with the theory and practice of ontological software engineering. So far, the majority of those books are dedicated to the th- retical foundations of ontologies, including philosophical treatises and their re- tionships to established methods in information systems and ontological software engineering.

The aim of computer-aided surgery (CAS) is to advance the utilization of computers in the development of new technologies for medical services. The Asian Conference on Computer Aided Surgery (ACCAS) series provides a forum for academic researchers, clinical scientists, surgeons, and industrial partners to exchange new ideas, techniques, and the latest developments in the field. The ACCAS brings together researchers from all fields related to medical activity visualization, simulation and modeling, virtual reality for CAS, image-guided diagnosis and therapies, CAS for minimally invasive intervention, medical robotics and instrumentation, surgical navigation, clinical application of CAS, telemedicine and telesurgery, and CAS education. The ACCAS is also interested in promoting collaboration among people from different disciplines and different countries in Asia and the world. This volume helps to achieve that goal and is a valuable resource for researchers and clinicians in the field.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps, WSOM 2011, held in Espoo, Finland, in June 2011. The 36 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on plenaries; financial and societal applications; theory and methodology; applications of data mining and analysis; language processing and document analysis; and visualization and image processing.

Computer-AidedInnovation(CAI)isayoungdomaininthearrayofCAxte- nologies. ThegoalofCAIistosupportengineersandenterprisesthroughoutthe completeinnovationprocess. AlthoughsomeexistingideasandconceptsofCAI focus on assisting product designers in their creative stage, a more compreh- sive vision conceives CAI systems beginning at the creative stage of perceiving business opportunities and customer demands, then helping in developing - ventions and, further on, providing help up to the point of turning inventions into successful innovations in the market. Following the track of the last two successful CAI conferences held in 2005, in Germany, and 2007 in USA, the ThirdIFIPWorkingConferenceonComputer-AidedInnovation(CAI)washeld in Harbin, China, and attractedparticipants fromacademia and industry. This workingconferencecontinuedthe traditionofstronglylinkingacademicand- dustrymembers. Theconferencehadseveralparallelsessions, andeightkeynote sessions. Over 100 participants attended the conference. Some famous scholars wereinvited askeynotespeakers. I would liketo takethe opportunityto thank all the authors for their quality research, the international Program Comm- teemembersfortheirsupportinreviewingthepapers, andthelocalOrganizing Committeefortheirpreparationoftheconference. Furthermore, IthanktheC- neseNaturalScienceFoundation, theDepartmentofScienceandTechnologyof HeilongjiangProvincialGovernment, theInstituteofDesignforInnovation, and Hebei University of Technology, for their ?nancial support of the conference. I wouldalsoliketothankZhuLin, YaoYihang, XueGuiying, andCaoGuozhong for their signi?cantcontributions towardthe successof the conference. August 2009 Runhua Tan Organization TheThirdIFIPWorkingConferenceonComputer-AidedInnovation(CAI)was organized by Hebei University of Technology and the Department of Science andTechnologyofHeilongjiangProvincialGovernmentincooperationwiththe National Natural Science Foundationof China. Program Committee Conference Chair Runhua Tan, (Hebei University ofTechnology, China) Noel Leon(ITESM, Campus Monterrey, Mexico) OrganizingChair T. S. Yang (Department ofScience and Technologyof Heilongjiang Provincial Government, China) Referees T. Arciszewski(USA) Y. Li (China) M. Ashtiani (USA) H. Liu (China) G. Cascini(Italy) M. L. Maher (Australia) D. Cavalucci (France) M. B. Mc Grath(USA) R. De Guio(France) G. Mukundan (USA) S. K. Cho (USA) G. Olling (USA) S. Finger (USA) J. Ovtcharova(Germany) J. Gero(Australia) E. Schueler-Hainsch(Germany) C. Gundlach(Germ

The development of the 'factory of the future' by major international corporations such as General Motors, IBM, Westinghouse, etc now involves many practising engineers. This book is an attempt to identify and describe some of the building blocks required for computer aided engineering for manufacture. It begins with numerical control and the infrastructure required for the automation of individual 'islands' within existing factories. Computer aided design and computer aided manufacture are then discussed in detail together with their integration to improve manufacturing efficiency and flexibility. Robotics and flexible manufacturing systems are examined, as well as the management of these systems required for production optimization. Finally, there is an overview of the relatively new field of artificial intelligence, which is being increasingly used in most aspects of computer aided engineering for manufacture. There are many topics which could have been included or expanded upon with advantage, but the authors have attempted to strike a balance so that the reader can obtain the maximum usefulness from a reasonably concise volume.

Powerful new technology has been made available to researchers by an increasingly competitive workstation market. Papers from Canada, Japan, Italy, Germany, and the U.S., to name a few of the countries represented in this volume, discuss how workstations are used in experiments and what impact this new technology will have on experiments. As usual for IFIP workshops, the emphasis in this volume is on the formulation of strategies for future research, the determination of new market areas, and the identification of new areas for workstation research. This is the first volume of a book series reporting the work of IFIP WG 5.10. The mission of this IFIP work- ing group is to promote, develop and encourage advancement of the field of computer graphics as a basic tool, as an enabling technology and as an important part of various application areas.

Multi-objective optimization deals with the simultaneous optimization of two or more objectives which are normally in con?ict with each other. Since mul- objective optimization problems are relatively common in real-world appli- tions, this area has become a very popular research topic since the 1970s. However, the use of bio-inspired metaheuristics for solving multi-objective op- mization problems started in the mid-1980s and became popular until the mid- 1990s. Nevertheless, the e?ectiveness of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms has made them very popular in a variety of domains. Swarm intelligence refers to certain population-based metaheuristics that are inspired on the behavior of groups of entities (i.e., living beings) interacting locallywitheachotherandwiththeirenvironment.Suchinteractionsproducean emergentbehaviorthatismodelledinacomputerinordertosolveproblems.The two most popular metaheuristics within swarm intelligence are particle swarm optimization (which simulates a ?ock of birds seeking food) and ant colony optimization (which simulates the behavior of colonies of real ants that leave their nest looking for food). These two metaheuristics havebecome verypopular inthelastfewyears, andhavebeenwidelyusedinavarietyofoptimizationtasks, including some related to data mining and knowledge discovery in databases. However, such work has been mainly focused on single-objective optimization models. The use of multi-objective extensions of swarm intelligence techniques in data mining has been relatively scarce, in spite of their great potential, which constituted the main motivation to produce this book

The purpose of this book is to discuss the state of the art and future trends in the field of computerized production management systems. It is composed of a number of independent papers, each presented in a chapter. Some of the widely recognized experts in the field around the world have been asked to contribute. lowe each of them my sincere gratitude for their kind cooperation. I am also grateful to Peter Falster and Jim Browne for their kind support in helping me to review topics to be covered and to select the authors. This book is a result of the professional work done in the International Federation of Information Processing Technical Committee IFIP TC5 "Com puter Applications in Technology" and especially in the Working Group WG5. 7 "Computer-Aided Production Management." This group was established in 1978 with the aim of promoting and encouraging the advancement of the field of computer systems for the production management of manufacturing, off shore, construction, electronic and similar and related industries. The scope of the work includes, but is not limited to, the following topics: 1) design and implementation of new production planning and control systems taking into account new technology and management philosophy; 2) CAPM in a CIM environment including interfaces to CAD and CAM; 3) project management and cost engineering; 4) knowledge engineering in CAPM; 5) CAPM for Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) and Flexible Assembly Systems (F AS); 6) methods and concepts in CAPM; 7) economic and social implications of CAPM."

Artificial intelligence provides an environmentally rich paradigm within which design research based on computational constructions can be carried out. This has been one of the foundations for the developing field called "design computing."

Recently, there has been a growing interest in what designers do when they design and how they use computational tools. This forms the basis of a newly emergent field called "design cognition" that draws partly on cognitive science.

This new conference series aims to provide a bridge between the two fields of "design computing" and "design cognition." The papers in this volume are from the "First International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition" (DCC'04) held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. They represent state-of-the art research and development in design computing and cognition. They are of particular interest to researchers, developers and users of advanced computation in design and those who need to gain a better understanding of designing.

From the Foreword..... Modern digital signal processing applications provide a large challenge to the system designer. Algorithms are becoming increasingly complex, and yet they must be realized with tight performance constraints. Nevertheless, these DSP algorithms are often built from many constituent canonical subtasks (e.g., IIR and FIR filters, FFTs) that can be reused in other subtasks. Design is then a problem of composing these core entities into a cohesive whole to provide both the intended functionality and the required performance. In order to organize the design process, there have been two major approaches. The top-down approach starts with an abstract, concise, functional description which can be quickly generated. On the other hand, the bottom-up approach starts from a detailed low-level design where performance can be directly assessed, but where the requisite design and interface detail take a long time to generate. In this book, the authors show a way to effectively resolve this tension by retaining the high-level conciseness of VHDL while parameterizing it to get good fit to specific applications through reuse of core library components. Since they build on a pre-designed set of core elements, accurate area, speed and power estimates can be percolated to high- level design routines which explore the design space. Results are impressive, and the cost model provided will prove to be very useful. Overall, the authors have provided an up-to-date approach, doing a good job at getting performance out of high-level design. The methodology provided makes good use of extant design tools, and is realistic in terms of the industrial design process. The approach is interesting in its own right, but is also of direct utility, and it will give the existing DSP CAD tools a highly competitive alternative. The techniques described have been developed within ARPAs RASSP (Rapid Prototyping of Application Specific Signal Processors) project, and should be of great interest there, as well as to many industrial designers. Professor Jonathan Allen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Curves and Surfaces, held in Avignon, in June 2010. The conference had the overall theme: "Representation and Approximation of Curves and Surfaces and Applications." The 39 revised full papers presented together with 9 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 114 talks presented at the conference. The topics addressed by the papers range from mathematical foundations to practical implementation on modern graphics processing units and address a wide area of topics such as computer-aided geometric design, computer graphics and visualisation, computational geometry and topology, geometry processing, image and signal processing, interpolation and smoothing, scattered data processing and learning theory and subdivision, wavelets and multi-resolution methods.

The NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Signal Processing and Pattern Recognition in Nondestructive Evaluation (NOE) of Materials was held August 19-22, 1987 at the Manoir St-Castin, Lac Beauport, Quebec, Canada. Modern signal processing, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence have been playing an increasingly important role in improving nondestructive evaluation and testing techniques. The cross fertilization of the two major areas can lead to major advances in NOE as well as presenting a new research area in signal processing. With this in mind, the Workshop provided a good review of progress and comparison of potential techniques, as well as constructive discussions and suggestions for effective use of modern signal processing to improve flaw detection, classification and prediction, as well as material characterization. This Proceedings volume includes most presentations given at the Workshop. This publication, like the meeting itself, is unique in the sense that it provides extensive interactions among the interrelated areas of NOE. The book starts with research advances on inverse problems and then covers different aspects of digital waveform processing in NOE and eddy current signal analysis. These are followed by four papers of pattern recognition and AI in NOE, and five papers of image processing and reconstruction in NOE. The last two papers deal with parameter estimation problems. Though the list of papers is not extensive, as the field of NOE signal processing is very new, the book has an excellent collection of both tutorial and research papers in this exciting new field.

Computer Graphics Tokyo, now in its fourth year, has established a world-wide reputation as an international technical conference, presenting work of high quality in the field of computer graphics. Each conference has been attended by a couple of thousand partiCipants from all over the world and tens of thousands have visited the exhibition. After strict peer review, 34 papers were accepted this year, of which about 40% were from the USA, 30% from Japan, 20% from Europe, and 10% from Canada. A good balance of papers on advanced research results, industrial/marketing surveys, and computer art technology has made Computer Graphics Tokyo an indispensable forum for researchers, engineers, and administrators working in this field. Computer graphics is a rapidly developing and expanding area and it is not easy to keep abreast of all the progress that has been made. This volume contains the proceedings of Computer Graphics Tokyo '86 and provides the reader with a comprehensive survey of the state of the art in computer graphics. Computational geometry (Chapter 1) is one of the fastest growing areas in computer graphics. This is well recognized as the basis of shape modeling. After shapes are modeled, they are displayed for visual observation. Chapter 2 on rendering presents various novel methods and technological innovations for visualizing shapes. To make display systems more acces sible to users, rich visual interfaces and languages are being designed, as shown in Chapter 3. Visual data bases for sharing graphics-and image-data are handled in Chapter 4."

Raster graphics differs from the more traditional vector or line graphics in the sense that images are not made up from line segments but from discrete elements orderly arranged in a two-dimensional rectangular region. There are two reasons for the growing popularity of raster graphics or bit-mapped displays: I) the possibilities they offer to show extremely realistic pictures 2) the dropping prices of those displays and associated processors and memories. With the rise of raster graphics, all kinds of new techniques, methods, algorithms and data representations are associated -such as ray tracing, raster operations, and quadtrees-bringing with them a lot of fruitful research. As stated above raster graphics allows to create extremely realistic (synthesized) pictures. There are important applications in such diverse areas as industrial deSign, flight Simulation, education, image processing and animation. Unfortunately many applications are hampered by the fact that with the present state of the art they reqUire an excessive amount of computing resources. Hence it is worthwhile to investigate methods and techniques which may be of help in redudng computer costs associated with raster graphics applications. Since the choice of data srtuc tures influences the efficiency of algorithms in a crudal way, a workshop was set up in order to bring together a (limited) number of experienced researchers to dis cuss this topic. The workshop was held from 24 to 28 June 1985 at Steensel, a tiny village in the neighbourhood of Eindhoven, the Netherlands.