This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Tests and Proofs, TAP 2014, held in York, UK, in July 2014, as part of the STAF 2014 Federated Conferences. The 10 revised full papers and 4 short papers presented together with two tutorial descriptions were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers cover topics in the following four research areas: test generation, bridging semantic gaps, integrated development processes and bounded verification.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Analytical and Stochastic Modelling Techniques and Applications, ASMTA 2014, held in Budapest, Hungary, in June/July 2014. The 18 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers discuss the latest developments in analytical, numerical and simulation algorithms for stochastic systems, including Markov processes, queueing networks, stochastic Petri nets, process algebras, game theory, etc.

The six-volume set LNCS 8579-8584 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2014, held in Guimaraes, Portugal, in June/July 2014. The 347 revised papers presented in 30 workshops and a special track were carefully reviewed and selected from 1167 initial submissions. The 289 papers presented in the workshops cover various areas in computational science ranging from computational science technologies to specific areas of computational science such as computational geometry and security.

The six-volume set LNCS 8579-8584 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2014, held in Guimaraes, Portugal, in June/July 2014. The 347 revised papers presented in 30 workshops and a special track were carefully reviewed and selected from 1167. The 289 papers presented in the workshops cover various areas in computational science ranging from computational science technologies to specific areas of computational science such as computational geometry and security.

"Design Rules for Actuators in Active Mechanical Systems" deals with the formulation of model-based design rules to be used in the conception of optimized mechatronic and adaptronic systems. The book addresses the comparison of different actuator classes for given applications and offers answers to the following questions: What is the relationship between actuator geometry and primary output quantities? How scalable are actuators based on the same principle? How are energetic output quantities (work and power) related to mechanical load and geometry? How should actuators be designed and sized to obtain the best performance for the chosen actuator kind, and for a given application? "Design Rules for Actuators in Active Mechanical Systems" will be of use to industry professionals, such as actuator and machine designers, as well as to researchers and students of mechanical engineering, mechatronics, and electrical engineering.

G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) comprise an important protein family, which is involved in signal transduction in the cell. Besides that a large number of drugs, available on market, address GPCRs. For an efficient and improved development of appropriate drugs, molecular modelling of GPCRs is - in order to understand the ligand-receptor interactions and functionality of GPCRs on molecular level - an important tool. The book "Modelling of GPCRs - a practical handbook" is focussed onto a practical introduction into molecular modelling of GPCRs. This book is very useful for beginners in GPCR modelling, but also addresses the advanced GPCR modeller: On the one hand, the book introduces principles of GPCR modelling, including extensive examples. On the other hand, detailed outlooks onto advanced GPCR modelling techniques are presented. Furthermore, the book includes important data, like information about crystal structures in a summarized manner or amino acid sequences, which are essential for GPCR modelling in general. Due to an increase in efficacy and data handling most modellers use LINUX as operating system. To address this, a summary of most important LINUX commands with examples is presented within the book.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2014, held in Krakow, Poland, in September 2014. The 67 full papers and 7 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: theoretical results on cellular automata; cellular automata dynamics and synchronization; modeling and simulation with cellular automata; cellular automata-based hardware and computing; cryptography, networks and pattern recognition with cellular automata. The volume also contains contributions from ACRI 2014 workshops on crowds and cellular automata; asynchronous cellular automata; traffic and cellular automata; and agent-based simulation and cellular automata.

Fuzzy classifiers are important tools in exploratory data analysis, which is a vital set of methods used in various engineering, scientific and business applications. Fuzzy classifiers use fuzzy rules and do not require assumptions common to statistical classification. Rough set theory is useful when data sets are incomplete. It defines a formal approximation of crisp sets by providing the lower and the upper approximation of the original set. Systems based on rough sets have natural ability to work on such data and incomplete vectors do not have to be preprocessed before classification. To achieve better performance than existing machine learning systems, fuzzy classifiers and rough sets can be combined in ensembles. Such ensembles consist of a finite set of learning models, usually weak learners. The present book discusses the three aforementioned fields - fuzzy systems, rough sets and ensemble techniques. As the trained ensemble should represent a single hypothesis, a lot of attention is placed on the possibility to combine fuzzy rules from fuzzy systems being members of classification ensemble. Furthermore, an emphasis is placed on ensembles that can work on incomplete data, thanks to rough set theory. .

Finite Element Programs for Structural Vibrations presents detailed descriptions of how to use six computer programs (written in Fortran 77) to determine the resonant frequencies of one, two, and three-dimensional skeletal structures through the finite element method. Chapter 1 is on "The Finite Element Method" and Chapter 2 demonstrates, with the aid of hand calculations, the finite element solution of some smaller structures. Chapter 3 covers "The Modular Approach", and Chapters 4 to 9 describe the six computer programs, with a large number of worked examples. The six computer programs are given in Appendices I through VI, and on a 3 1/2'' disk included with the book. The programs are suitable for use on IBM (or compatible) PC (640K or more) or minicomputer.

This book is written to introduce computer simulations to undergraduate college students, freshmen to seniors, in STEM fields. The book starts with concepts from Basic Mathematics: Geometry, Algebra and Calculus, Properties of Elementary Functions (Polynomials, Exponential, Hyperbolic and Trigonometric Functions) are studied and simple differential equations representing these functions are derived. Numerical approximations of first and second order differential equations are studied in terms of finite differences on uniform grids. Computer solutions are obtained via recursive relations or solutions of simultaneous algebraic equations. Comparisons with the exact solutions (known a priori) allow the calculations of the error due to discretization. After the students build confidence in this approach, more problems where the solutions are not known a priori are tackled with applications in many fields. Next, the book gradually addresses linear differential equations with variable coefficients and nonlinear differential equations, including problems of bifurcation and chaos.Applications in Dynamics, Solid Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, Heat Transfer, Chemical Reactions, and Combustion are included. Biographies of 50 pioneering mathematicians and scientists who contributed to the materials of the book are briefly sketched, to shed light on the history of these STEM fields.Finally, the main concepts discussed in the book, are summarized to make sure that the students do not miss any of them. Also, references for further readings are given for interested readers.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing, JSSPP 2013, held Boston, MA, USA, in May 2013. The 10 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 20 submissions. The papers cover the following topics parallel scheduling for commercial environments, scientific computing, supercomputing and cluster platforms.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Large-Scale Scientific Computations, LSSC 2013, held in Sozopol, Bulgaria, in June 2013. The 74 revised full papers presented together with 5 plenary and invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on numerical modeling of fluids and structures; control and uncertain systems; Monte Carlo methods: theory, applications and distributed computing; theoretical and algorithmic advances in transport problems; applications of metaheuristics to large-scale problems; modeling and numerical simulation of processes in highly heterogeneous media; large-scale models: numerical methods, parallel computations and applications; numerical solvers on many-core systems; cloud and grid computing for resource-intensive scientific applications.

The six-volume set LNCS 8579-8584 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2014, held in Guimaraes, Portugal, in June/July 2014. The 347 revised papers presented in 30 workshops and a special track were carefully reviewed and selected from 1167. The 289 papers presented in the workshops cover various areas in computational science ranging from computational science technologies to specific areas of computational science such as computational geometry and security.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Energy Efficient Data Centers, E(2)DC 2013, held in Berkeley, CA, USA, in May 2013; co-located with SIGCOMM e-Energy 2013. The 8 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on energy and workload measurement; energy management; simulators and control.

This book deals with transportation processes denoted as the Real-time Distribution of Perishable Goods (RDOPG). The book presents three contributions that are made to the field of transportation. First, a model considering the minimization of customer inconvenience is formulated. Second, a pro-active real-time control approach is proposed. Stochastic knowledge is generated from past request information by a new forecasting approach and is used in the pro-active approach to guide vehicles to request-likely areas before real requests arrive there. Various computational results are presented to show that in many cases the pro-active approach is able to achieve significantly improved results. Moreover, a measure for determining the structural quality of request data sets is also proposed. The third contribution of this book is a method that is presented for considering driver inconvenience aspects which arise from vehicle en-route diversion activities. Specifically, this method makes it possible to restrict the number of performed vehicle en-route diversion activities.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information Processing in Computer-Assisted Interventions, IPCAI 2014, held in Fukuoka, Japan, on June 28, 2014. The 28 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on planning, simulation, patient specific models for computer assisted interventions, medical robotics and surgical navigation, interventional imaging and advanced intra-op visualization, cognition, modeling and context awareness, clinical applications, systems, software, and validation.

This volume contains proceedings of the Case Study Track, held at the 4th International Conference, ABZ 2014, in Toulouse, France, in June 2014. The 11 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They use different formal techniques: B, ASM, Fiacre. They also propose different kinds of verification such as proof, model checking, test generation, run-time monitoring, and simulation.

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.

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.

Energy consumption is of great interest to manufacturing companies. Beyond considering individual processes and machines, the perspective on process chains and factories as a whole holds major potentials for energy efficiency improvements. To exploit these potentials, dynamic interactions of different processes as well as auxiliary equipment (e.g. compressed air generation) need to be taken into account. In addition, planning and controlling manufacturing systems require balancing technical, economic and environmental objectives. Therefore, an innovative and comprehensive methodology - with a generic energy flow-oriented manufacturing simulation environment as a core element - is developed and embedded into a step-by-step application cycle. The concept is applied in its entirety to a wide range of case studies such as aluminium die casting, weaving mills, and printed circuit board assembly in order to demonstrate the broad applicability and the benefits that can be achieved.

The field of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has now taken centre stage in modern clinical practice. With ever changing technologies in the field of MIS, such as robotics, there is now the need to train the surgeon to the next degree. Training by simulation, whether virtual, hybrid, or real, allows the surgeon to rehearse, learn, improve or maintain their skills in a safe and stress free environment.

"Simulation Training in Laparoscopy and Robotic Surgery" gives a true insight into the latest educational and learning techniques for new technologies in surgery. Written by an international team of experts, this illustrated text provides advice on specialised team training, non technical skills and simulation.

"Simulation Training in Laparoscopy and Robotic Surgery" is an important training aide for surgeons and residents interested in developing skills in this field.

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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.

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 presents the state-of-the-art in simulation on supercomputers. Leading researchers present results achieved on systems of the Gauss-Allianz, the association of High-Performance Computing centers in Germany. The reports cover all fields of computational science and engineering, ranging from CFD to Computational Physics and Biology to Computer Science, with a special emphasis on industrially relevant applications. Presenting results for large-scale parallel microprocessor-based systems and GPU and FPGA-supported systems, the book makes it possible to compare the performance levels and usability of various architectures. Its outstanding results in achieving the highest performance for production codes are of particular interest for both scientists and engineers. The book includes a wealth of color illustrations and tables.

This book provides a complete and comprehensive reference/guide to Pyomo (Python Optimization Modeling Objects) for both beginning and advanced modelers, including students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, academic researchers, and practitioners. The text illustrates the breadth of the modeling and analysis capabilities that are supported by the software and support of complex real-world applications. Pyomo is an open source software package for formulating and solving large-scale optimization and operations research problems. The text begins with a tutorial on simple linear and integer programming models. A detailed reference of Pyomo's modeling components is illustrated with extensive examples, including a discussion of how to load data from data sources like spreadsheets and databases. Chapters describing advanced modeling capabilities for nonlinear and stochastic optimization are also included. The Pyomo software provides familiar modeling features within Python, a powerful dynamic programming language that has a very clear, readable syntax and intuitive object orientation. Pyomo includes Python classes for defining sparse sets, parameters, and variables, which can be used to formulate algebraic expressions that define objectives and constraints. Moreover, Pyomo can be used from a command-line interface and within Python's interactive command environment, which makes it easy to create Pyomo models, apply a variety of optimizers, and examine solutions. The software supports a different modeling approach than commercial AML (Algebraic Modeling Languages) tools, and is designed for flexibility, extensibility, portability, and maintainability but also maintains the central ideas in modern AMLs.