Computer-Aided Innovation (CAI) is emerging as a strategic domain of research and application to support enterprises throughout the overall innovation process. The 5.4 Working Group of IFIP aims at defining the scientific foundation of Computer Aided Innovation systems and at identifying state of the art and trends of CAI tools and methods. These Proceedings derive from the second Topical Session on Computer- Aided Innovation organized within the 20th World Computer Congress of IFIP. The goal of the Topical Session is to provide a survey of existing technologies and research activities in the field and to identify opportunities of integration of CAI with other PLM systems. According to the heterogeneous needs of innovation-related activities, the papers published in this volume are characterized by multidisciplinary contents and complementary perspectives and scopes. Such a richness of topics and disciplines will certainly contribute to the promotion of fruitful new collaborations and synergies within the IFIP community. Gaetano Cascini th Florence, April 30 20 08 CAI Topical Session Organization The IFIP Topical Session on Computer-Aided Innovation (CAI) is a co-located conference organized under the auspices of the IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC) 2008 in Milano, Italy Gaetano Cascini CAI Program Committee Chair [email protected]

In recent years meshless/meshfree methods have gained considerable attention in engineering and applied mathematics. The variety of problems that are now being addressed by these techniques continues to expand and the quality of the results obtained demonstrates the effectiveness of many of the methods currently available. The book presents a significant sample of the state of the art in the field with methods that have reached a certain level of maturity while also addressing many open issues. The book collects extended original contributions presented at the Second ECCOMAS Conference on Meshless Methods held in 2007 in Porto. The list of contributors reveals a fortunate mix of highly distinguished authors as well as quite young but very active and promising researchers, thus giving the reader an interesting and updated view of different meshless approximation methods and their range of applications. The material presented is appropriate for researchers, engineers, physicists, applied mathematicians and graduate students interested in this active research area.

Assertion-based IP is much more than a comprehensive set of related assertions. It is a full-fledged reusable and configurable transaction-level verification component, which is used to detect both interesting and incorrect behaviors. Upon detecting interesting or incorrect behavior, the assertion-based IP alerts other verification components within a simulation environment, which are responsible for taking appropriate action. The focus of this book is to bring the assertion discussion up to a higher level and introduce a process for creating effective, reusable, assertion-based IP, which easily integrates with the user s existing verification environment, in other words the testbench infrastructure.

The guiding principles promoted in this book when creating an assertion-based IP monitor are:

• modularity assertion-based IP should have a clear separation between detection and action
  
• clarity assertion-based IP should be written initially focusing on capturing intent (versus optimizations)

A unique feature of this book is the fully worked out, detailed examples. The concepts presented in the book are drawn from the authors experience developing assertion-based IP, as well as general assertion-based techniques. Creating Assertion-Based IP is an important resource for design and verification engineers.

From the Foreword:

Creating Assertion-Based IP " reduces to process the creation of one of the most valuable kinds of VIP: assertion-based VIP This book will serve as a valuable reference for years to come."
Andrew Piziali, Sr. Design Verification Engineer
Co-Author, ESL Design and Verification: A Prescription for Electronic System Level Methodology
Author, Functional Verification Coverage Measurement and Analysis"

Hardware veri?cation is the process of checking whether a design conforms to its speci?cations of functionality and timing. In today's design processes it becomes more and more important. Very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits and the resulting digital systems have conquered a place in almost all areas of our life, even in security sensitive applications. Complex digital systems control airplanes, have been used in banks and on intensive-care units. Hence, the demand for error-free designs is more important than ever. In addition, economic reasons underline this demand as well. The design and production process of present day VLSI-circuits is highly time- and cost-intensive. Mo- over, it is nearly impossible to repair integrated circuits. Thus, it is desirable to detect design errors early in the design process and not just after producing the prototype chip. All these facts are re?ected by developing and prod- tion statistics of present day companies. For example, In?neon Technologies [118] assumed that about 60% to 80% of the overall design time was spent for veri?cation in 2000. Other sources cite the 3-to-1 head count ratio between veri?cation engineers and logic designers. This shows that verifying logical correctness of the design of hardware systems is a major gate to the problem of time-to-market (cf. [113]). With the chip complexity constantly increasing, the dif?culty as well as the - portance of functional veri?cation of new product designs has been increased. It is not only more important to get error-free designs.

This book covers in a great depth the fast growing topic of tools, techniques and applications of soft computing (e.g., fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, neural networks, rough sets, Bayesian networks, and other probabilistic techniques) in the ontologies and the Semantic Web. The author shows how components of the Semantic Web (like the RDF, Description Logics, ontologies) can be covered with a soft computing methodology.

Introduction The exponential scaling of feature sizes in semiconductor technologies has side-effects on layout optimization, related to effects such as inter connect delay, noise and crosstalk, signal integrity, parasitics effects, and power dissipation, that invalidate the assumptions that form the basis of previous design methodologies and tools. This book is intended to sample the most important, contemporary, and advanced layout opti mization problems emerging with the advent of very deep submicron technologies in semiconductor processing. We hope that it will stimulate more people to perform research that leads to advances in the design and development of more efficient, effective, and elegant algorithms and design tools. Organization of the Book The book is organized as follows. A multi-stage simulated annealing algorithm that integrates floorplanning and interconnect planning is pre sented in Chapter 1. To reduce the run time, different interconnect plan ning approaches are applied in different ranges of temperatures. Chapter 2 introduces a new design methodology - the interconnect-centric design methodology and its centerpiece, interconnect planning, which consists of physical hierarchy generation, floorplanning with interconnect planning, and interconnect architecture planning. Chapter 3 investigates a net-cut minimization based placement tool, Dragon, which integrates the state of the art partitioning and placement techniques."

Verification is increasingly complex, and SystemVerilog is one of the languages that the verification community is turning to. However, no language by itself can guarantee success without proper techniques. Object-oriented programming (OOP), with its focus on managing complexity, is ideally suited to this task.

With this handbook-the first to focus on applying OOP to SystemVerilog-we'll show how to manage complexity by using layers of abstraction and base classes. By adapting these techniques, you will write more "reasonable" code, and build efficient and reusable verification components.

Both a learning tool and a reference, this handbook contains hundreds of real-world code snippets and three professional verification-system examples. You can copy and paste from these examples, which are all based on an open-source, vendor-neutral framework (with code freely available at www.trusster.com).

Learn about OOP techniques such as these:

• Creating classes-code interfaces, factory functions, reuse
• Connecting classes-pointers, inheritance, channels
• Using "correct by construction"-strong typing, base classes
• Packaging it up-singletons, static methods, packages

This book contains an edited version of the lectures and selected contributions presented during the Advanced Summer Institute (ASI) on "Product Engineering: Tools and Methods based on Virtual Reality" held at Chania (Greece), 30th May - 6th June 2007. The ASI was devoted to the Product Engineering field, with particular attention being given to the aspects related to Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, and their use and added value in engineering.

Intelligent agents are one of the most promising business tools in our information rich world. An intelligent agent consists of a software system capable of performing intelligent tasks within a dynamic and unpredictable environment. They can be characterised by various attributes including: autonomous, adaptive, collaborative, communicative, mobile, and reactive. Many problems are not well defined and the information needed to make decisions is not available. These problems are not easy to solve using conventional computing approaches. Here, the intelligent agent paradigm may play a major role in helping to solve these problems. This book, written for application researchers, covers a broad selection of research results that demonstrate, in an authoritative and clear manner, the applications of agents within our information society.

Interconnect has become the dominating factor in determining system performance in nanometer technologies. This book is dedicated to this important subject. The primary purpose of this monograph is to provide insight and intuition into layout analysis and optimization for interconnect in high speed, high complexity integrated circuits.

In this monograph, the effects of wire size, spacing between wires, wire length, coupling length, load capacitance, rise time of the inputs, place of overlap (near driver or receiver side), frequency, shields, direction of the signals, and wire width for both the aggressors and the victim wires on system performance and reliability is thoroughly investigated. Also, parameters like driver strength has been considered as several recent studies considered the simultaneous device and interconnect sizing. Crosstalk noise, as well as the impact of coupling on aggressor delay is analyzed. The pulse width of the crosstalk noise, which is of similar importance for circuit performance as the peak amplitude, is also analyzed. We have considered more parameters that can affect the signal integrity and presented practical intensive simulation results.

This book brings together a wealth of information previously scattered throughout the literature, presenting a range of CAD algorithms and techniques for synthesizing and optimizing interconnect. The practical aspects of the algorithms and models are explained with sufficient detail.

It deeply investigates the most two effective parameters in layout optimization, spacing and shield insertion, that can affect both capacitive and inductive noise. Noise models needed for layouts with multi-layer multi-crosscoupling segments are investigated. Different post-layout optimization techniques are explained with complexity analysis and benchmarks tests are provided.

Collaborative Product Design and Manufacturing Methodologies and Applications introduces a wide spectrum of collaborative engineering issues in design and manufacturing. It offers state-of-the-art chapters written by international experts from academia and industry, and reflects the most up-to-date R & D work and applications, especially those from the last three to five years. The book will serve as an essential reference for academics, upper-level undergraduate and graduate students and practicing professionals.

This book carefully details design tools and techniques for realizing low power and energy efficiency in a highly productive design methodology.

Important topics include:
- Microarchitectural techniques to reduce energy per operation
- Power reduction with timing slack from pipelining
- Analysis of the benefits of using multiple supply and threshold voltages
- Placement techniques for multiple supply voltages
- Verification for multiple voltage domains
- Improved algorithms for gate sizing, and assignment of supply and threshold voltages
- Power gating design automation to reduce leakage
- Relationships among tatistical timing, power analysis, and parametric yield optimization

Design examples illustrate that these techniques can improve energy efficiency by two to three times.

Fuzzy Logic in Action: Applications in Epidemiology and Beyond, co-authored by Eduardo Massad, Neli Ortega, Laecio Barros, and Claudio Struchiner is a remarkable achievement. The book brings a major paradigm shift to medical sciences exploring the use of fuzzy sets in epidemiology and medical diagnosis arena. The volume addresses the most significant topics in the broad areas of epidemiology, mathematical modeling and uncertainty, embodying them within the framework of fuzzy set and dynamic systems theory. Written by leading contributors to the area of epidemiology, medical informatics and mathematics, the book combines a very lucid and authoritative exposition of the fundamentals of fuzzy sets with an insightful use of the fundamentals in the area of epidemiology and diagnosis. The content is clearly illustrated by numerous illustrative examples and several real world applications. Based on their profound knowledge of epidemiology and mathematical modeling, and on their keen understanding of the role played by uncertainty and fuzzy sets, the authors provide insights into the connections between biological phenomena and dynamic systems as a mean to predict, diagnose, and prescribe actions. An example is the use of Bellman-Zadeh fuzzy decision making approach to develop a vaccination strategy to manage measles epidemics in Sao Paulo. The book offers a comprehensive, systematic, fully updated and self- contained treatise of fuzzy sets in epidemiology and diagnosis. Its content covers material of vital interest to students, researchers and practitioners and is suitable both as a textbook and as a reference. The authors present new results of their own in most of the chapters. In doing so, they reflect the trend to view fuzzy sets, probability theory and statistics as an association of complementary and synergetic modeling methodologies.

This is the first book to focus on emerging technologies for distributed intelligent decision-making in process planning and dynamic scheduling. It has two sections: a review of several key areas of research, and an in-depth treatment of particular techniques. Each chapter addresses a specific problem domain and offers practical solutions to solve it. The book provides a better understanding of the present state and future trends of research in this area.

Efficient assembly line design is a problem of considerable industrial importance. Assembly Line Design will be bought by technical personnel working in design, planning and production departments in industry as well as managers in industry who want to learn more about concurrent engineering. This book will also be purchased by researchers and postgraduate students in mechanical, manufacturing or micro-engineering.

In today's competitive world, industries focus on shorter lead times, improved quality, reduced cost, improved productivity and better customer service. This book offers an overview of intelligent computing in manufacturing, discussing modeling, data processing, algorithms and computational analysis of problems encountered in advanced manufacturing. Coverage includes techniques to aid decision makers dealing with multiple, conflicting objectives. Readers will gain knowledge of computational technologies for improving the performance of manufacturing systems.

Evolutionary algorithms are successful biologically inspired meta-heuristics. Their success depends on adequate parameter settings. The question arises: how can evolutionary algorithms learn parameters automatically during the optimization? Evolution strategies gave an answer decades ago: self-adaptation. Their self-adaptive mutation control turned out to be exceptionally successful. But nevertheless self-adaptation has not achieved the attention it deserves. This book introduces various types of self-adaptive parameters for evolutionary computation. Biased mutation for evolution strategies is useful for constrained search spaces. Self-adaptive inversion mutation accelerates the search on combinatorial TSP-like problems. After the analysis of self-adaptive crossover operators the book concentrates on premature convergence of self-adaptive mutation control at the constraint boundary. Besides extensive experiments, statistical tests and some theoretical investigations enrich the analysis of the proposed concepts.

A set of original results in the ?eld of high-level design of logical control devices and systems is presented in this book. These concern different aspects of such important and long-term design problems, including the following, which seem to be the main ones. First, the behavior of a device under design must be described properly, and some adequate formal language should be chosen for that. Second, effective algorithmsshouldbeusedforcheckingtheprepareddescriptionforcorrectness, foritssyntacticandsemanticveri?cationattheinitialbehaviorlevel.Third, the problem of logic circuit implementation must be solved using some concrete technological base; ef?cient methods of logic synthesis, test, and veri?cation should be developed for that. Fourth, the task of the communication between the control device and controlled objects (and maybe between different control devices)waitsforitssolution.Alltheseproblemsarehardenoughandcannotbe successfully solved without ef?cient methods and algorithms oriented toward computer implementation. Some of these are described in this book. The languages used for behavior description have been descended usually from two well-known abstract models which became classic: Petri nets and ?nite state machines (FSMs). Anyhow, more detailed versions are developed and described in the book, which enable to give more complete information concerningspeci?cqualitiesoftheregardedsystems.Forexample, themodelof parallelautomatonispresented, whichunliketheconventional?niteautomaton can be placed simultaneously into several places, calledpartial. As a base for circuit implementation of control algorithms, FPGA is accepted in majority of cas

This book offers up a deep understanding of concepts and practices behind the composition of heterogeneous components. After the analysis of existing computation and execution models used for the specification and validation of different sub-systems, the book introduces a systematic approach to build an execution model for systems composed of heterogeneous components. Mixed continuous/discrete and hardware/software systems are used to illustrate these concepts. The benefit of reading this book is to arrive at a clear vision of the theory and practice of specification and validation of complex modern systems. Numerous examples give designers highly applicable solutions.

Integrating formal property verification (FPV) into an existing design process raises several interesting questions. Have I written enough properties? Have I written a consistent set of properties? What should I do when the FPV tool runs into capacity issues? This book develops the answers to these questions and fits them into a roadmap for formal property verification a roadmap that shows how to glue FPV technology into the traditional validation flow. A Roadmap for Formal Property Verification explores the key issues in this powerful technology through simple examples you do not need any background on formal methods to read most parts of this book.

"

This book presents design guidelines and implementation approaches for enterprise safety management system as integrated within enterprise integrated systems. It shows new model-based safety management where process design automation is integrated with enterprise business functions and components. It proposes new system engineering approach addressed to new generation chemical industry. It will help both the undergraduate and professional readers to build basic knowledge about issues and problems of designing practical enterprise safety management system, while presenting in clear way, the system and information engineering practices to design enterprise integrated solution.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Barclay G. Jones, Professor of City and Regional Planning and Regional Science at Cornell University. Over a decade ago, Barclay took on a fledgling area of study - economic modeling of disasters - and nurtured its early development. He served as the social science program director at the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (NCEER), a university consortium sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Federal Emergency Management Agency of the United States. In this capacity, Barclay shepherded and attracted a number of regional scientists to the study of disasters. He organized a conference, held in the ill-fated World Trade Center in September 1995, on "The Economic Consequences of Earthquakes: Preparing for the Unexpected. " He persistently advocated the importance of social science research in an establishment dominated by less-than-sympathetic natural scientists and engineers. In 1993, Barclay organized the first of a series of sessions on "Measuring Regional Economic Effects of Unscheduled Events" at the North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI). This unusual nomenclature brought attention to the challenge that disasters -largely unanticipated, often sudden, and always disorderly - pose to the regional science modeling tradition. The sessions provided an annual forum for a growing coalition of researchers, where previously the literature had been fragmentary, scattered, and episodic. Since Barclay's unexpected passing in 1997, we have continued this effort in his tradition.

Traditionally, the DDSS conferences aim to be a platform for both starting and experienced researchers who focus on the development and application of computer support in urban planning and architectural design. This volume contains 31 peer reviewed papers from this year's conference. This book will bring researchers together and is a valuable resource for their continuous joint effort to improve the design and planning of our environment.

Hugo de Man Professor Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Senior Research Fellow IMEC The steady evolution of hardware, software and communications technology is rapidly transforming the PC- and dot.com world into the world of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). This next wave of information technology is fundam- tally different in that it makes distributed wired and wireless computing and communication disappear to the background and puts users to the foreground. AmI adapts to people instead of the other way around. It will augment our consciousness, monitor our health and security, guide us through traffic etc. In short, its ultimate goal is to improve the quality of our life by a quiet, reliable and secure interaction with our social and material environment. What makes AmI engineering so fascinating is that its design starts from studying person to world interactions that need to be implemented as an int- ligent and autonomous interplay of virtually all necessary networked electronic intelligence on the globe. This is a new and exciting dimension for most elect- cal and software engineers and may attract more creative talent to engineering than pure technology does. Development of the leading technology for AmI will only succeed if the engineering research community is prepared to join forces in order to make Mark Weiser's dream of 1991 come true. This will not be business as usual by just doubling transistor count or clock speed in a microprocessor or increasing the bandwidth of communication.

Soft computing embraces methodologies for the development of intelligent systems that have been successfully applied to a large number of real-word problems. This collection of keynote papers, presented at the 7th On-line World Conference on Soft Computing in Engineering Design and Manufacturing, provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances in fuzzy, neural and evolutionary computing techniques and applications in engineering design and manufacturing.

Features:
- New and highly advanced research results at the forefront of soft computing in engineering design and manufacturing.
- Keynote papers by world-renowned researchers in the field.
- A good overview of current soft computing research around the world.

A collection of methodologies aimed at researchers and professional design and manufacturing engineers who develop and apply intelligent systems in computer engineering.