Recent trends in the fashion market (including an impressive increase in the number of new collections, product assortments and variants, and the emerging mass-customization model) dictate the need for a new approach. "Transforming Clothing Production into a Demand-Driven, Knowledge-Based, High-Tech Industry" discusses the ramifications of such an approach, which must lead to a drastic shortening of the whole cycle from conception to production and retail, as well as a shift from a labor-intensive to a technology- and knowledge-intensive clothing manufacturing industry. "Transforming Clothing Production into a Demand-Driven, Knowledge-Based, High-Tech Industry" is a collection of short papers from prominent researchers involved with the LEAPFROG (Leadership for European Apparel Production From Research along Original Guidelines) initiative. LEAPFROG proposes a revolutionary industrial paradigm based on research results in scientific-technological fields.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Simulation of Urban Mobility, SUMO 2013, held in Berlin, Germany, in May 2013. The 12 revised full papers presented tin this book were carefully selected and reviewed from 22 submissions. The papers are organized in two topical sections: models and technical innovations and applications and surveys.

Precise dynamic models of processes are required for many applications, ranging from control engineering to the natural sciences and economics. Frequently, such precise models cannot be derived using theoretical considerations alone. Therefore, they must be determined experimentally. This book treats the determination of dynamic models based on measurements taken at the process, which is known as system identification or process identification. Both offline and online methods are presented, i.e. methods that post-process the measured data as well as methods that provide models during the measurement. The book is theory-oriented and application-oriented and most methods covered have been used successfully in practical applications for many different processes. Illustrative examples in this book with real measured data range from hydraulic and electric actuators up to combustion engines. Real experimental data is also provided on the Springer webpage, allowing readers to gather their first experience with the methods presented in this book. Among others, the book covers the following subjects: determination of the non-parametric frequency response, (fast) Fourier transform, correlation analysis, parameter estimation with a focus on the method of Least Squares and modifications, identification of time-variant processes, identification in closed-loop, identification of continuous time processes, and subspace methods. Some methods for nonlinear system identification are also considered, such as the Extended Kalman filter and neural networks. The different methods are compared by using a real three-mass oscillator process, a model of a drive train. For many identification methods, hints for the practical implementation and application are provided. The book is intended to meet the needs of students and practicing engineers working in research and development, design and manufacturing.

I want to express my sincere thanks to all authors who submitted research papers to support the Third IFIP International Conference on Computer and Computing Te- nologies in Agriculture and the Third Symposium on Development of Rural Infor- tion (CCTA 2009) held in China, during October 14-17, 2009. This conference was hosted by the CICTA (EU-China Centre for Information & Communication Technologies, China Agricultural University), China National En- neering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, Asian Conf- ence on Precision Agriculture, International Federation for Information Processing, Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering, Beijing Society for Information Te- nology in Agriculture, and the Chinese Society for Agricultural Machinery. The pla- num sponsor includes the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, Ministry of Agriculture of China, Ministry of Education of China, among others. The CICTA (EU-China Centre for Information & Communication Technologies, China Agricultural University) focuses on research and development of advanced and practical technologies applied in agriculture and on promoting international communi- tion and cooperation. It has successfully held three International Conferences on C- puter and Computing Technologies in Agriculture, namely CCTA 2007, CCTA 2008 and CCTA 2009. Sustainable agriculture is the focus of the whole world currently, and therefore the application of information technology in agriculture is becoming more and more - portant. 'Informatized agriculture' has been sought by many countries recently in order to scientifically manage agriculture to achieve low costs and high incomes.

Data driven methods have long been used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis and have more recently been introduced for dialogue management, spoken language understanding, and Natural Language Generation. Machine learning is now present "end-to-end" in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS). However, these techniques require data collection and annotation campaigns, which can be time-consuming and expensive, as well as dataset expansion by simulation. In this book, we provide an overview of the current state of the field and of recent advances, with a specific focus on adaptivity.

This book introduces the techniques needed to produce realistic simulations and animations of particle and rigid-body systems. The text focuses on both the theoretical and practical aspects of developing and implementing physically based dynamic-simulation engines. Each chapter examines numerous algorithms, describing their design and analysis in an accessible manner, without sacrificing depth of coverage or mathematical rigor. Features: examines the problem of computing an hierarchical representation of the geometric description of each simulated object, as well as the simulated world; discusses the use of discrete and continuous collision detection to handle thin or fast-moving objects; describes the computational techniques needed for determining all impulsive and contact forces between bodies with multiple simultaneous collisions and contacts; presents techniques that can be used to dynamically simulate articulated rigid bodies; concludes each chapter with exercises.

SYROM conferences have been organized since 1973 by the Romanian branch of the International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanisms and Machine Science IFToMM, Year by year the event grew in quality. Now in its 10th edition, international visibility and recognition among the researchers active in the mechanisms science field has been achieved. SYROM 2009 brought together researchers and academic staff from the field of mechanisms and machine science from all over the world and served as a forum for presenting the achievements and most recent results in research and education. Topics treated include conceptual design, kinematics and dynamics, modeling and simulation, synthesis and optimization, command and control, current trends in education in this field, applications in high-tech products. The papers presented at this conference were subjected to a peer-review process to ensure the quality of the paper, the engineering significance, the soundness of results and the originality of the paper. The accepted papers fulfill these criteria and make the proceedings unique among the publications of this type.

This book highlights recent developments in multidimensional data visualization, presenting both new methods and modifications on classic techniques. Throughout the book, various applications of multidimensional data visualization are presented including its uses in social sciences (economy, education, politics, psychology), environmetrics, and medicine (ophthalmology, sport medicine, pharmacology, sleep medicine). The book provides recent research results in optimization-based visualization. Evolutionary algorithms and a two-level optimization method, based on combinatorial optimization and quadratic programming, are analyzed in detail. The performance of these algorithms and the development of parallel versions are discussed. The utilization of new visualization techniques to improve the capabilies of artificial neural networks (self-organizing maps, feed-forward networks) is also discussed. The book includes over 100 detailed images presenting examples of the many different visualization techniques that the book presents. This book is intended for scientists and researchers in any field of study where complex and multidimensional data must be represented visually.

Simulation and Verification of Electronic and Biological Systems provides a showcase for the Circuit and Multi-Domain Simulation Workshop held in San Jose, California, USA, on November 5, 2009. The nine chapters are contributed by experts in the field and provide a broad discussion of recent developments on simulation, modeling and verification of integrated circuits and biological systems. Specific topics include large scale parallel circuit simulation, industrial practice of fast SPICE simulation, structure-preserving model order reduction of interconnects, advanced simulation techniques for oscillator networks, dynamic stability of static memories and biological systems as well as verification of analog integrated circuits. Simulation and verification are fundamental enablers for understanding, analyzing and designing an extremely broad range of engineering and biological circuits and systems. The design of nanometer integrated electronic systems and emerging biomedical applications have stimulated the development of novel simulation and verification techniques and methodologies. Simulation and Verification of Electronic and Biological Systems provides a broad discussion of recent advances on simulation, modeling and verification of integrated circuits and biological systems and offers a basis for stimulating new innovations.

Bridging the gap between concepts derived from Second Law of Thermodynamics and their application to Engineering practice, the property exergy and the exergy balance can be a tool for analyzing and improving the performance of energy conversion processes. With the exergy analysis it is possible to evaluate the performance of energy conversion processes not only on a thermodynamics basis but also by including production costs and environmental aspects and impacts of the studied processes. This comprehensive approach of the use of energy has, as one of the most important feature, the identification of sustainable ways of energy resources utilization. Based on the fundamentals of the exergy concept, its calculation, graphical representations and exergy balances evaluation, Exergy: Production Cost And Renewability describes the application of detailed exergy and thermoeconomic analysis to power plants and polygeneration systems, petroleum production and refining plants (including hydrogen production), chemical plants, biofuel production routes, combined production of ethanol and electricity, aircraft systems design, environmental impact mitigation processes and human body behavior. The presented case studies aim at providing students, researchers and engineers with guidelines to the utilization of the exergy and thermoeconomic analysis to model, simulate and optimize real processes and industrial plants.

Computer languages and computer graphics have become the primary modes of human-computer interaction. This book provides a basic introduction to "Real and Virtual Environment" computer modelling. Graphics models are used to illustrate both the way computer languages are processed and also used to create computer models of graphic displays. Computer languages have been bootstrapped from machine code, to high-level languages such as Java, to animation scripting languages. Integrating graphic and computer models takes this support for programming, design and simulation work, one step further, allowing interactive computer graphic displays to be used to construct computer models of both real and virtual environment systems. The Java language is used to implement basic algorithms for language translation, and to generate graphic displays. It is also used to simulate the behaviour of a computer system, to explore the way programming and design-simulation environments can be put together.

The storage yard is the operational and geographical centre of most seaport container terminals. Therefore, it is of particular importance for the whole terminal system and plays a major role for trade and transport flows. One of the latest trends in container-storage operations is the automated Rail-Mounted-Gantry-Crane system, which offers dense stacking, and offers low labour costs. This book investigates whether the operational performance of container terminals is influenced by the design of these storage systems and to what extent the performance is affected by the terminal's framework conditions, and discusses the strategies applied for container stacking and crane scheduling. A detailed simulation model is presented to compare the performance effects of alternative storage designs, innovative planning strategies, and other influencing factors. The results have useful implications future research, practical terminal planning and optimisation.

Modeling of photovoltaic sources and their emulation by means of power electronic converters are challenging issues. The former is tied to the knowledge of the electrical behavior of the PV generator; the latter consists in its realization by a suitable power amplifier. This extensive introduction to the modeling of PV generators and their emulation by means of power electronic converters will aid in understanding and improving design and set up of new PV plants. The main benefit of reading Photovoltaic Sources is the ability to face the emulation of photovoltaic generators obtained by the design of a suitable equipment in which voltage and current are the same as in a real source. This is achieved according to the following steps: the source electrical behavior modeling, the power converter design, including its control, for the laboratory emulator. This approach allows the reader to cope with the creation of an indoor virtual photovoltaic plant, in which the environmental conditions can be imposed by the user, for testing real operation including maximum power point tracking, partial shading, control for the grid or load interfacing, etc. Photovoltaic Sources is intended to meet the demands of postgraduate level students, and should prove useful to professional engineers and researchers dealing with the problems associated with modeling and emulation of photovoltaic sources.

Grasping in Robotics contains original contributions in the field of grasping in robotics with a broad multidisciplinary approach. This gives the possibility of addressing all the major issues related to robotized grasping, including milestones in grasping through the centuries, mechanical design issues, control issues, modelling achievements and issues, formulations and software for simulation purposes, sensors and vision integration, applications in industrial field and non-conventional applications (including service robotics and agriculture). The contributors to this book are experts in their own diverse and wide ranging fields. This multidisciplinary approach can help make Grasping in Robotics of interest to a very wide audience. In particular, it can be a useful reference book for researchers, students and users in the wide field of grasping in robotics from many different disciplines including mechanical design, hardware design, control design, user interfaces, modelling, simulation, sensors and humanoid robotics. It could even be adopted as a reference textbook in specific PhD courses.

This book describes thermal plant simulation, that is, dynamic simulation of plants which produce, exchange and otherwise utilize heat as their working medium. Directed at chemical, mechanical and control engineers involved with operations, control and optimization and operator training, the book gives the mathematical formulation and use of simulation models of the equipment and systems typically found in these industries. The author has adopted a fundamental approach to the subject. The initial chapters provide an overview of simulation concepts and describe a suitable computer environment. Reviews of relevant numerical computation methods and fundamental thermodynamics are followed by a detailed examination of the basic conservation equations. The bulk of the book is concerned with development of specific simulation models. Care is taken to trace each model derivation path from the basic underlying physical equations, explaining simplifying and restrictive assumptions as they arise and relating the model coefficients to the physical dimensions and physical properties of the working materials. Numerous photographs of real equipment complement the text and most models are illustrated by numerical examples based on typical real plant operations.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of workshops, held at the 32nd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2013, in Hong Kong, China in November 2013. The 30 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected out of 57 submissions. The papers are organized in sections related to the individual workshops: LSAWM, Legal and Social Aspects in Web Modeling; MoBiD, 1st International Workshop on Modeling and Management of Big Data; RIGiM, 5th International Workshop on Requirements, Intentions and Goals in Conceptual Modeling; SeCoGIS, 7th International Workshop on Semantic and Conceptual Issues in Geographic Information Systems; WISM, 10th International Workshop on Web Information Systems Modeling; DaSeM, Data Mining and Semantic Computing for Object Modeling; SCME, 1st Symposium on Conceptual Modeling Education; and PhD Symposium. Continuing the ER tradition, the ER 2013 workshops provided researchers, students, and industry professionals with a forum to present and discuss emerging, cutting-edge topics related to conceptual modeling and its applications.

This book includes extended and revised versions of a set of selected papers from the 3rd International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications (SIMULTECH 2013) which was co-organized by the Reykjavik University (RU) and sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC). SIMULTECH 2013 was held in cooperation with the ACM SIGSIM - Special Interest Group (SIG) on SImulation and Modeling (SIM), Movimento Italiano Modellazione e Simulazione (MIMOS) and AIS Special Interest Group on Modeling and Simulation (AIS SIGMAS) and technically co-sponsored by the Society for Modeling & Simulation International (SCS), Liophant Simulation, Simulation Team and International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). This proceedings brings together researchers, engineers, applied mathematicians and practitioners working in the advances and applications in the field of system simulation.

The ease of use of the programs in the application to ever more complex cases of disease and pestilence. The lack of need on the part of the student or modelers of mathematics beyond algebra and the lack of need of any prior computer programming experience. The surprising insights that can be gained from initially simple systems models.

Implicit objects have gained increasing importance in geometric modeling, visualisation, animation, and computer graphics, because their geometric properties provide a good alternative to traditional parametric objects. This book presents the mathematics, computational methods and data structures, as well as the algorithms needed to render implicit curves and surfaces, and shows how implicit objects can easily describe smooth, intricate, and articulatable shapes, and hence why they are being increasingly used in graphical applications. Divided into two parts, the first introduces the mathematics of implicit curves and surfaces, as well as the data structures suited to store their sampled or discrete approximations, and the second deals with different computational methods for sampling implicit curves and surfaces, with particular reference to how these are applied to functions in 2D and 3D spaces.

The two-volume set LNCS 8618 and 8619 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference EuroHaptics 2014, held in Versailles, France, in June 2014. The 118 papers (36 oral presentations and 82 poster presentations) presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 183 submissions. Furthermore, 27 demos were exhibited, each of them resulting in a short paper included in the volumes. These proceedings reflect the multidisciplinary nature of EuroHaptics and cover topics such as human-computer interaction, human-robot interactions, neuroscience, perception and psychophysics, biomechanics and motor control, modelling and simulation; and a broad range of applications in medicine, rehabilitation, art, and design.

7. 1. 1 Background Uncertainty can be considered as the lack of adequate information to make a decision. It is important to quantify uncertainties in mathematical models used for design and optimization of nondeterministic engineering systems. In general, - certainty can be broadly classi?ed into three types (Bae et al. 2004; Ha-Rok 2004; Klir and Wierman 1998; Oberkampf and Helton 2002; Sentz 2002). The ?rst one is aleatory uncertainty (also referred to as stochastic uncertainty or inherent - certainty) - it results from the fact that a system can behave in random ways. For example, the failure of an engine can be modeled as an aleatory uncertaintybecause the failure can occur at a random time. One cannot predict exactly when the engine will fail even if a large quantity of failure data is gathered (available). The second one is epistemic uncertainty (also known as subjective uncertainty or reducible - certainty) - it is the uncertainty of the outcome of some random event due to lack of knowledge or information in any phase or activity of the modeling process. By gaining information about the system or environmental factors, one can reduce the epistemic uncertainty. For example, a lack of experimental data to characterize new materials and processes leads to epistemic uncertainty.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Transport Systems Telematics, TST 2014, held in Katowice/Krakow and Ustron, Poland, in October 2014. The 49 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. The papers provide an overview of solutions being developed in the fields of transport telematics and intelligent transport systems.

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.

This book is the sixth in the ChDL (Chip Design Languages) series. Year 2004 has seen many efforts in the ?eld of electronic and mixed technology circuit design languages. The industry has recognized the need for system level design as a way to enable the design of the next generation of emb- ded systems. This is demonstrated by the "ESL Now!" campaign that many companies are promoting. This year has also seen many interesting st- dardization efforts for system level design, such as SystemC TLM (http: //www. systemc. org/) for transactional level modeling with SystemC, AU- TOSAR (http://www. autosar. org/) for automotive embedded system - plications, or SPIRIT (http://www. spiritconsortium. org/) for IP int- change. In the ?eld of modeling languages, the Model Driven Architecture of the OMG (http://www. omg. org/mda/) has given rise to model driven en- neering, which is a more general way of software engineering based on model transformations. As embedded systems are more and more programmable and as the design abstraction level rises, model driven methodologies are also c- sidered for electronic system level design. In this context, the OMG has - cently published a call for propositions for a UML 2. 0 pro?le for Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded systems (MARTE). The constraints on the design process of these next generation embedded systems are considerable: Real-time, power consumption, complexity, mixed technology integration, correctness, time to market, cost, ...

This book deals with the analysis, the design and the implementation of the mechatronic systems. Classical and modern tools are developed for the analysis and the design for such systems. Robust control, H-Infinity and guaranteed cost control theory are also used for analysis and design of mechatronic systems. Different controller such as state feedback, static output feedback and dynamic output feedback controllers are used to stabilize mechatronic systems. Heuristic algorithms are provided to solve the design of the classical controller such as PID, phase lead, phase lag and phase lead-lag controllers while linear matrix inequalities (LMI) algorithms are provided for finding solutions to the state feedback, static output feedback and dynamic output feedback controllers. The theory presented in the different chapters of the volume is applied to numerical examples to show the usefulness of the theoretical results. Some case studies are also provided to show how the developed concepts apply for real system. Emphasis is also put on the implementation in real-time for some real systems that we have developed in our mechatronic laboratory and all the detail is provided to give an idea to the reader how to implement its own mechatronic system. Mechatronics Systems: Analysis, Design and Implementation is an excellent textbook for undergraduate and graduate students in mechatronic system and control theory and as a reference for academic researchers in control or mathematics with interest in control theory. The reader should have completed first-year graduate courses in control theory, linear algebra, and linear systems. It will also be of great value to engineers practising in fields where the systems can be modeled by linear time invariant systems.