This volume constitutes the papers presented at the 15th International Conference on Computer Aided Systems Theory, EUROCAST 2015, held in February 2015 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. The total of 107 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The contributions are organized in topical sections on Systems Theory and Applications; Modelling Biological Systems; Intelligent Information Processing; Theory and Applications of Metaheuristic Algorithms; Computer Methods, Virtual Reality and Image Processing for Clinical and Academic Medicine; Signals and Systems in Electronics; Model-Based System Design, Verification, and Simulation; Digital Signal Processing Methods and Applications; Modelling and Control of Robots; Mobile Platforms, Autonomous and Computing Traffic Systems; Cloud and Other Computing Systems; and Marine Sensors and Manipulators.

This book explains and examines the theoretical underpinnings of the Complex Variable Boundary Element Method (CVBEM) as applied to higher dimensions, providing the reader with the tools for extending and using the CVBEM in various applications. Relevant mathematics and principles are assembled and the reader is guided through the key topics necessary for an understanding of the development of the CVBEM in both the usual two as well as three or higher dimensions. In addition to this, problems are provided that build upon the material presented. The Complex Variable Boundary Element Method (CVBEM) is an approximation method useful for solving problems involving the Laplace equation in two dimensions. It has been shown to be a useful modelling technique for solving two-dimensional problems involving the Laplace or Poisson equations on arbitrary domains. The CVBEM has recently been extended to 3 or higher spatial dimensions, which enables the precision of the CVBEM in solving the Laplace equation to be now available for multiple dimensions. The mathematical underpinnings of the CVBEM, as well as the extension to higher dimensions, involve several areas of applied and pure mathematics including Banach Spaces, Hilbert Spaces, among other topics. This book is intended for applied mathematics graduate students, engineering students or practitioners, developers of industrial applications involving the Laplace or Poisson equations and developers of computer modelling applications.

3D Imaging, Analysis and Applications brings together core topics, both in terms of well-established fundamental techniques and the most promising recent techniques in the exciting field of 3D imaging and analysis. Many similar techniques are being used in a variety of subject areas and applications and the authors attempt to unify a range of related ideas. With contributions from high profile researchers and practitioners, the material presented is informative and authoritative and represents mainstream work and opinions within the community. Composed of three sections, the first examines 3D imaging and shape representation, the second, 3D shape analysis and processing, and the last section covers 3D imaging applications. Although 3D Imaging, Analysis and Applications is primarily a graduate text, aimed at masters-level and doctoral-level research students, much material is accessible to final-year undergraduate students. It will also serve as a reference text for professional academics, people working in commercial research and development labs and industrial practitioners.

Christoph Clauser and Jom Bartels SHE MAT (Simulator for HEat and MAss Transport) is an easy-to-use, general- purpose reactive transport simulation code for a wide variety of thermal and hy- drogeological problems in two and three dimensions. Specifically, SHEMAT solves coupled problems involving fluid flow, heat transfer, species transport, and chemical water-rock interaction in fluid-saturated porous media. It can handle a wide range of time scales. Therefore, it is useful to address both technical and geo- logical processes. In particular, it offers special and attractive features for model- ing steady-state and transient processes in hydro-geothermal reservoirs. This makes it well suited to predict the long-term behavior of heat mining installations in hot aquifers with highly saline brines. SHEMA T in its present form evolved from a fully coupled flow and heat transport model (Clauser 1988) which had been developed from the isothermal USGS 3-D groundwater model of Trescott and Larson (Trescott 1975; Trescott and Larson 1977). Transport of dissolved species, geochemical reactions between the solid and fluid phases, extended cou- pling between the individual processes (most notably between porosity and per- meability), and a convenient user interface (developed from Processing Modflow (Chiang and Kinzelbach 2001)) were added during several research projects funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) under grant CL 12117 and the German Federal Ministries for Education, Science, Research, and Technology (BMBF) under grant 032 69 95A-D and for Economics and Technology (BMWi) under grant 0327095 (Bartels et al. 2002, Kuhn et al. 2002a).

In order to satisfy the needs of their customers, network utilities require specially developed maintenance management capabilities. Maintenance Management information systems are essential to ensure control, gain knowledge and improve-decision making in companies dealing with network infrastructure, such as distribution of gas, water, electricity and telecommunications. Maintenance Management in Network Utilities studies specified characteristics of maintenance management in this sector to offer a practical approach to defining and implementing the best management practices and suitable frameworks.
Divided into three major sections, Maintenance Management in Network Utilities defines a series of stages which can be followed to manage maintenance frameworks properly. Different case studies provide detailed descriptions which illustrate the experience in real company situations. An introduction to the concepts is followed by main sections including:

A Literature Review: covering the basic concepts and models needed for framework design, development and implementation.
Framework Design and Definition: developing the basic pillars of network utilities maintenance management framework.
Performance Evaluation & Maturity: focusing on the reliability concept and maturity models from different viewpoints.

By establishing basic foundations for creating and maintaining maintenance managements strategies, Maintenance Management in Network Utilities acts a practical handbook for all professionals in these companies and across areas such as network development, operations management and marketing.
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A Focus on SLM and SLS Methods in 3D Printing is an indispensable collection of articles for anyone involved in additive manufacturing - from academics and researchers through to engineers and managers within the manufacturing industry. The collection features examples of innovative research involving selective laser melting and selective laser sintering techniques applied across a range of contexts.

This innovative text emphasizes a "less-is-more" approach to modeling complicated systems such as heat transfer by treating them first as "1-node lumped models" that yield simple closed-form solutions. The author develops numerical techniques for students to obtain more detail, but also trains them to use the techniques only when simpler approaches fail. Covering all essential methods offered in traditional texts, but with a different order, Professor Sidebotham stresses inductive thinking and problem solving as well as a constructive understanding of modern, computer-based practice. Readers learn to develop their own code in the context of the material, rather than just how to use packaged software, offering a deeper, intrinsic grasp behind models of heat transfer. Developed from over twenty-five years of lecture notes to teach students of mechanical and chemical engineering at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the book is ideal for students and practitioners across engineering disciplines seeking a solid understanding of heat transfer. This book also: * Adopts a novel inductive pedagogy where commonly understood examples are introduced early and theory is developed to explain and predict readily recognized phenomena * Introduces new techniques as needed to address specific problems, in contrast to traditional texts' use of a deductive approach, where abstract general principles lead to specific examples * Elucidates readers' understanding of the "heat transfer takes time" idea-transient analysis applications are introduced first and steady-state methods are shown to be a limiting case of those applications * Focuses on basic numerical methods rather than analytical methods of solving partial differential equations, largely obsolete in light of modern computer power * Maximizes readers' insights to heat transfer modeling by framing theory as an engineering design tool, not as a pure science, as has been done in traditional textbooks * Integrates practical use of spreadsheets for calculations and provides many tips for their use throughout the text examples

This book looks at the convergent nature of technology and its relationship to the field of photogrammetry and 3D design. This is a facet of a broader discussion of the nature of technology itself and the relationship of technology to art, as well as an examination of the educational process. In the field of technology-influenced design-based education it is natural to push for advanced technology, yet within a larger institution the constraints of budget and adherence to tradition must be accepted. These opposing forces create a natural balance; in some cases constraints lead to greater creativity than freedom ever can - but in other cases the opposite is true. This work offers insights into ways to integrate new technologies into the field of design, and from a broader standpoint it also looks ahead, raising further questions and looking to the near future as to what additional technologies might cause further disruptions to 3D design as well as wonderful creative opportunities.

In this self-consistent monograph, the author gathers and describes different mathematical techniques and combines all together to form practical procedures for the inverse analyses. It puts together topics coming from mathematical programming, with soft computing and Proper Orthogonal Decomposition, in order to show, in the context of structural analyses, how the things work and what are the main problems one needs to tackle.

Throughout the book a number of examples and exercises are worked out in order to make reader practically familiar with discussed topics.

This two volume set (CCIS 398 and 399) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Symposium on Geo-Informatics in Resource Management and Sustainable Ecosystem, GRMSE 2013, held in Wuhan, China, in November 2013. The 136 papers presented, in addition to 4 keynote speeches and 5 invited sessions, were carefully reviewed and selected from 522 submissions. The papers are divided into 5 sessions: smart city in resource management and sustainable ecosystem, spatial data acquisition through RS and GIS in resource management and sustainable ecosystem, ecological and environmental data processing and management, advanced geospatial model and analysis for understanding ecological and environmental process, applications of geo-informatics in resource management and sustainable ecosystem.

This book provides an overview of recent developments and applications of the Land Use Scanner model, which has been used in spatial planning for well over a decade. Internationally recognized as among the best of its kind, this versatile model can be applied at a national level for trend extrapolation, scenario studies and optimization, yet can also be employed in a smaller-scale regional context, as demonstrated by the assortment of regional case studies included in the book. Alongside these practical examples from the Netherlands, readers will find discussion of more theoretical aspects of land-use models as well as an assessment of various studies that aim to develop the Land-Use Scanner model further.

Spanning the divide between the abstractions of land-use modelling and the imperatives of policy making, this is a cutting-edge account of the way in which the Land-Use Scanner approach is able to interrogate a spectrum of issues that range from climate change to transportation efficiency. Aimed at planners, researchers and policy makers who need to stay abreast of the latest advances in land-use modelling techniques in the context of planning practice, the book guides the reader through the applications supported by current instrumentation. It affords the opportunity for a wide readership to benefit from the extensive and acknowledged expertise of Dutch planners, who have originated a host of much-used models."

This book deals with one of the most novel advances in natural computing, namely, in the field of tactile sense analysis. Massage, which provides relaxation and stimulation for human beings, is analyzed in this book for the first time by encoding the motions and tactile senses involved. The target audience is not limited to researchers who are interested in natural computing but also includes those working in ergonomic design, biomedical engineering, Kansei engineering, and cognitive science.

Decision makers in large scale interconnected network systems require simulation models for decision support. The behaviour of these systems is determined by many actors, situated in a dynamic, multi-actor, multi-objective and multi-level environment. How can such systems be modelled and how can the socio-technical complexity be captured? Agent-based modelling is a proven approach to handle this challenge. This book provides a practical introduction to agent-based modelling of socio-technical systems, based on a methodology that has been developed at TU Delft and which has been deployed in a large number of case studies. The book consists of two parts: the first presents the background, theory and methodology as well as practical guidelines and procedures for building models. In the second part this theory is applied to a number of case studies, where for each model the development steps are presented extensively, preparing the reader for creating own models.

An overview of biomechanical modeling of human soft tissue using nonlinear theoretical mechanics and incremental finite element methods, useful for computer simulation of the human musculoskeletal system.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 36th German Conference on Pattern Recognition, GCPR 2014, held in Munster, Germany, in September 2014. The 58 revised full papers and 8 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 153 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on variational models for depth and flow, reconstruction, bio-informatics, deep learning and segmentation, feature computation, video interpretation, segmentation and labeling, image processing and analysis, human pose and people tracking, interpolation and inpainting.

The physics and dynamics of the atmosphere and atmosphere-ocean interactions provide the foundation of modern climate models, upon which our understanding of the chemistry and biology of ocean and land surface processes are built. Originally published in 2006, Frontiers of Climate Modeling captures developments in modeling the atmosphere, and their implications for our understanding of climate change, whether due to natural or anthropogenic causes. Emphasis is on elucidating how greenhouse gases and aerosols are altering the radiative forcing of the climate system and the sensitivity of the system to such perturbations. An expert team of authors address key aspects of the atmospheric greenhouse effect, clouds, aerosols, atmospheric radiative transfer, deep convection dynamics, large scale ocean dynamics, stratosphere-troposphere interactions, and coupled ocean-atmosphere model development. The book is an important reference for researchers and advanced students interested in the forces driving the climate system and how they are modeled by climate scientists.

This book generalizes fuzzy logic systems for different types of uncertainty, including - semantic ambiguity resulting from limited perception or lack of knowledge about exact membership functions - lack of attributes or granularity arising from discretization of real data - imprecise description of membership functions - vagueness perceived as fuzzification of conditional attributes. Consequently, the membership uncertainty can be modeled by combining methods of conventional and type-2 fuzzy logic, rough set theory and possibility theory. In particular, this book provides a number of formulae for implementing the operation extended on fuzzy-valued fuzzy sets and presents some basic structures of generalized uncertain fuzzy logic systems, as well as introduces several of methods to generate fuzzy membership uncertainty. It is desirable as a reference book for under-graduates in higher education, master and doctor graduates in the courses of computer science, computational intelligence, or fuzzy control and classification, and is especially dedicated to researchers and practitioners in industry.

The focus of this volume is comprised of the fundamentals, models, and information technologies (IT) methods and tools for disaster prediction and mitigation. A more detailed list of topics includes mathematical and computational modeling of processes leading to or producing disasters, modeling of disaster effects, IT means for disaster mitigation, including data mining tools, knowledge-based and expert systems for use in disaster circumstances, GIS-based systems for disaster prevention and mitigation and equipment for disaster-prone areas. A specific type or class of disasters (natural or human-made), however will not be part of the main focus of this work. Instead, this book was conceived to offer a comprehensive, integrative view on disasters, seeking to determine what various disasters have in common. Because disaster resilience and mitigation involve humans, societies and cultures, not only technologies and economic models, special attention was paid in this volume to gain a comprehensive view on these issues, as a foundation of the IT tool design.

This book/software package brings the tools and excitement of modeling to pre-college teachers, to researchers involved in curriculum development, and to software developers interested in the pre-college market.

The purpose of this book is to present a methodology for designing and tuning fuzzy expert systems in order to identify nonlinear objects; that is, to build input-output models using expert and experimental information. The results of these identifications are used for direct and inverse fuzzy evidence in forecasting and diagnosis problem solving. The book is organised as follows: Chapter 1 presents the basic knowledge about fuzzy sets, genetic algorithms and neural nets necessary for a clear understanding of the rest of this book. Chapter 2 analyzes direct fuzzy inference based on fuzzy if-then rules. Chapter 3 is devoted to the tuning of fuzzy rules for direct inference using genetic algorithms and neural nets. Chapter 4 presents models and algorithms for extracting fuzzy rules from experimental data. Chapter 5 describes a method for solving fuzzy logic equations necessary for the inverse fuzzy inference in diagnostic systems. Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to inverse fuzzy inference based on fuzzy relations and fuzzy rules. Chapter 8 presents a method for extracting fuzzy relations from data. All the algorithms presented in Chapters 2-8 are validated by computer experiments and illustrated by solving medical and technical forecasting and diagnosis problems. Finally, Chapter 9 includes applications of the proposed methodology in dynamic and inventory control systems, prediction of results of football games, decision making in road accident investigations, project management and reliability analysis.

Collected articles in this series are dedicated to the development and use of software for earth system modelling and aims at bridging the gap between IT solutions and climate science. The particular topic covered in this volume addresses the usefulness of coupling infrastructures and data management, strategies and tools for pre- and post-processing, and coupling software and strategies in regional and global coupled climate models. This first part in the series of 6 books sets the scene for the following volumes.

Commanding and controlling organizations in extreme situations is a challenging task in military, intelligence, and disaster management. Such command and control must be quick, effective, and considerate when dealing with the changing, complex, and risky conditions of the situation. To enable optimal command and control under extremes, robust structures and efficient operations are required of organizations. This work discusses how to design and conduct virtual experiments on resilient organizational structures and operational practices using modeling and simulation. The work illustrates key aspects of robustly networked organizations and modeled performance of human decision-makers through examples of naval-air defense, counterterrorism operations, and disaster responses.

Mobile Intention Recognition addresses problems of practical relevance for mobile system engineers: how can we make mobile assistance systems more intelligent? How can we model and recognize patterns of human behavior which span more than a limited spatial context? This text provides an overview on plan and intention recognition, ranging from the late 1970s to very recent approaches. This overview is unique as it discusses approaches with respect to the specificities of mobile intention recognition. This book covers problems from research on mobile assistance systems using methods from artificial intelligence and natural language processing. It thus addresses an extraordinary interdisciplinary audience.

This SpringerBrief focuses on the use of egress models to assess the optimal strategy for total evacuation in high-rise buildings. It investigates occupant relocation and evacuation strategies involving the exit stairs, elevators, sky bridges and combinations thereof. Chapters review existing information on this topic and describe case study simulations of a multi-component exit strategy. This review provides the architectural design, regulatory and research communities with a thorough understanding of the current and emerging evacuation procedures and possible future options. A model case study simulates seven possible strategies for the total evacuation of two identical twin towers linked with two sky-bridges at different heights. The authors present the layout of the building and the available egress components including both vertical and horizontal egress components, namely stairs, occupant evacuation elevators (OEEs), service elevators, transfer floors and sky-bridges. The evacuation strategies employ a continuous spatial representation evacuation model (Pathfinder) and are cross-validated by a fine network model (STEPS). Assessment of Total Evacuation Systems for Tall Buildings is intended for practitioners as a tool for analyzing evacuation methods and efficient exit strategies. Researchers working in architecture and fire safety will also find the book valuable.

Variational Regularization of 3D Data provides an introduction to variational methods for data modelling and its application in computer vision. In this book, the authors identify interpolation as an inverse problem that can be solved by Tikhonov regularization. The proposed solutions are generalizations of one-dimensional splines, applicable to n-dimensional data and the central idea is that these splines can be obtained by regularization theory using a trade-off between the fidelity of the data and smoothness properties. As a foundation, the authors present a comprehensive guide to the necessary fundamentals of functional analysis and variational calculus, as well as splines. The implementation and numerical experiments are illustrated using MATLAB (R). The book also includes the necessary theoretical background for approximation methods and some details of the computer implementation of the algorithms. A working knowledge of multivariable calculus and basic vector and matrix methods should serve as an adequate prerequisite.