There is a myriad of different methodologies for transforming real-world scenarios into information system models. Moreover, this transformation process is critical not only for developing a successful information system, but also for helping users optimize their work and make their organizations more efficient. Tabular Application Development for Information Systems describes the workings and utility of Tabular Application Development (TAD) as an object-oriented methodology that uses tables to model the real world. Essentially, TAD entails collecting information about a real-world situation into tables, identifying and implementing changes by analyzingthe tabularized content, and then using the data gathered in the changed tables to develop the organization's information system. Given that tables can be easily surveyed and modified, analysts can locate almost immediately any information about business processes, work processes, activities, tasks, or events. In addition, the user can confidently proceed without misunderstandings and can quickly rectify any mistake or problem. Topics and features:*TAD's advantages over UML methodology in terms of simplicity, utility for either small or large information systems, and independence from the analyst*presents the subject of business process reengineering and information systems development from a new perspective*thorough descriptions of three case-study applications of TAD*briefly introduces all key object-oriented concepts*segments the TAD methodology into six clearly defined phases This book offers an essential exposition on the TAD method for information systems development and design. Practitioners and professionals in information science, computer science, and business process reengineering will find the work a highly useful resource when using TAD for rapid, efficient software development.

Convexity of sets in linear spaces, and concavity and convexity of functions, lie at the root of beautiful theoretical results that are at the same time extremely useful in the analysis and solution of optimization problems, including problems of either single objective or multiple objectives. Not all of these results rely necessarily on convexity and concavity; some of the results can guarantee that each local optimum is also a global optimum, giving these methods broader application to a wider class of problems. Hence, the focus of the first part of the book is concerned with several types of generalized convex sets and generalized concave functions. In addition to their applicability to nonconvex optimization, these convex sets and generalized concave functions are used in the book's second part, where decision-making and optimization problems under uncertainty are investigated. Uncertainty in the problem data often cannot be avoided when dealing with practical problems. Errors occur in real-world data for a host of reasons. However, over the last thirty years, the fuzzy set approach has proved to be useful in these situations. It is this approach to optimization under uncertainty that is extensively used and studied in the second part of this book. Typically, the membership functions of fuzzy sets involved in such problems are neither concave nor convex. They are, however, often quasiconcave or concave in some generalized sense. This opens possibilities for application of results on generalized concavity to fuzzy optimization. Despite this obvious relation, applying the interface of these two areas has been limited to date. It is hoped that the combination of ideas and results from the field of generalized concavity on the one hand and fuzzy optimization on the other hand outlined and discussed in Generalized Concavity in Fuzzy Optimization and Decision Analysis will be of interest to both communities. Our aim is to broaden the classes of problems that the combination of these two areas can satisfactorily address and solve.

Evolutionary Algorithms, in particular Evolution Strategies, Genetic Algorithms, or Evolutionary Programming, have found wide acceptance as robust optimization algorithms in the last ten years. Compared with the broad propagation and the resulting practical prosperity in different scientific fields, the theory has not progressed as much.This monograph provides the framework and the first steps toward the theoretical analysis of Evolution Strategies (ES). The main emphasis is on understanding the functioning of these probabilistic optimization algorithms in real-valued search spaces by investigating the dynamical properties of some well-established ES algorithms. The book introduces the basic concepts of this analysis, such as progress rate, quality gain, and self-adaptation response, and describes how to calculate these quantities. Based on the analysis, functioning principles are derived, aiming at a qualitative understanding of why and how ES algorithms work.

This volume, the 6th volume in the DRUMS Handbook series, is part of the after math of the successful ESPRIT project DRUMS (Defeasible Reasoning and Un certainty Management Systems) which took place in two stages from 1989-1996. In the second stage (1993-1996) a work package was introduced devoted to the topics Reasoning and Dynamics, covering both the topics of 'Dynamics of Rea soning', where reasoning is viewed as a process, and 'Reasoning about Dynamics', which must be understood as pertaining to how both designers of and agents within dynamic systems may reason about these systems. The present volume presents work done in this context. This work has an emphasis on modelling and formal techniques in the investigation of the topic "Reasoning and Dynamics," but it is not mere theory that occupied us. Rather research was aimed at bridging the gap between theory and practice. Therefore also real-life applications of the modelling techniques were considered, and we hope this also shows in this volume, which is focused on the dynamics of reasoning processes. In order to give the book a broader perspective, we have invited a number of well-known researchers outside the project but working on similar topics to contribute as well. We have very pleasant recollections of the project, with its lively workshops and other meetings, with the many sites and researchers involved, both within and outside our own work package."

Applied Time Series Analysis and Innovative Computing contains the applied time series analysis and innovative computing paradigms, with frontier application studies for the time series problems based on the recent works at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford, the University of Hong Kong, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The monograph was drafted when the author was a post-doctoral fellow in Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. It provides a systematic introduction to the use of innovative computing paradigms as an investigative tool for applications in time series analysis. Applied Time Series Analysis and Innovative Computing offers the state of art of tremendous advances in applied time series analysis and innovative computing paradigms and also serves as an excellent reference work for researchers and graduate students working on applied time series analysis and innovative computing paradigms.

Agda is an advanced programming language based on Type Theory. Agda's type system is expressive enough to support full functional verification of programs, in two styles. In external verification, we write pure functional programs and then write proofs of properties about them. The proofs are separate external artifacts, typically using structural induction. In internal verification, we specify properties of programs through rich types for the programs themselves. This often necessitates including proofs inside code, to show the type checker that the specified properties hold. The power to prove properties of programs in these two styles is a profound addition to the practice of programming, giving programmers the power to guarantee the absence of bugs, and thus improve the quality of software more than previously possible. Verified Functional Programming in Agda is the first book to provide a systematic exposition of external and internal verification in Agda, suitable for undergraduate students of Computer Science. No familiarity with functional programming or computer-checked proofs is presupposed. The book begins with an introduction to functional programming through familiar examples like booleans, natural numbers, and lists, and techniques for external verification. Internal verification is considered through the examples of vectors, binary search trees, and Braun trees. More advanced material on type-level computation, explicit reasoning about termination, and normalization by evaluation is also included. The book also includes a medium-sized case study on Huffman encoding and decoding.

Arc Routing: Theory, Solutions and Applications is about arc traversal and the wide variety of arc routing problems, which has had its foundations in the modern graph theory work of Leonhard Euler. Arc routing methods and computation has become a fundamental optimization concept in operations research and has numerous applications in transportation, telecommunications, manufacturing, the Internet, and many other areas of modern life. The book draws from a variety of sources including the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and graph theory, which are used and studied by operations research, engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians. In the last ten years or so, there has been extensive coverage of arc routing problems in the research literature, especially from a graph theory perspective; however, the field has not had the benefit of a uniform, systematic treatment. With this book, there is now a single volume that focuses on state-of-the-art exposition of arc routing problems, that explores its graph theoretical foundations, and that presents a number of solution methodologies in a variety of application settings. Moshe Dror has succeeded in working with an elite group of ARC routing scholars to develop the highest quality treatment of the current state-of-the-art in arc routing.

"An Introduction to XML Query Processing and Keyword Search" systematically and comprehensively covers the latest advances in XML data searching. It presents an extensive overview of the current query processing and keyword search techniques on XML data, including XML labeling schemes, indexing, processing on order and un-order XML tree patterns, XML query optimization, results estimation, and XML keyword searches, which are elaborated in separate chapters. Graduate students and researchers in the field of XML data searching will find this book an invaluable resource. Prof. Jiaheng Lu is an associate professor at Renmin University of China's School of Information.

The book focuses on analyses that extract the flow of data, which imperative programming hides through its use and reuse of memory in computer systems and compilers. It will detail some program transformations that conserve this data flow and will introduce a family of analyses, called reaching definition analyses, to do this task. In addition, it shows that correctness of program transformations is guaranteed by the conservation of data flow.
Professionals and researchers in software engineering, computer engineering, program design analysis, and compiler design will benefit from its presentation of data-flow methods and memory optimization of compilers.

You might think more than enough design books exist in the programming world already. In fact, there are so many that it makes sense to ask why you would read yet another. Is there really a need for yet another design book? In fact, there is a greater need than ever before, and Practical API Design: Confessions of a Java Framework Architect fills that need! Teaches you how to write an API that will stand the test of Time Written by the designer of the NetBeans API at Sun Based on best practices, scalability, and API design patterns What you'll learn What an API is and what the theories are behind good API design When and why to build an API API design patterns applicable to all programming languages, especially modern, object-oriented languages How to optimize and test APIs Who this book is for

This book is recommended to every API architect who prefers a bit more engineering design over a purely artistic one.

"Pyramid Algorithms" presents a unique approach to understanding, analyzing, and computing the most common polynomial and spline curve and surface schemes used in computer-aided geometric design, employing a dynamic programming method based on recursive pyramids.
The recursive pyramid approach offers the distinct advantage of revealing the entire structure of algorithms, as well as relationships between them, at a glance. This book-the only one built around this approach-is certain to change the way you think about CAGD and the way you perform it, and all it requires is a basic background in calculus and linear algebra, and simple programming skills.
* Written by one of the world's most eminent CAGD researchers
* Designed for use as both a professional reference and a textbook, and addressed to computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, theoreticians, and students alike
* Includes chapters on Bezier curves and surfaces, B-splines, blossoming, and multi-sided Bezier patches
* Relies on an easily understood notation, and concludes each section with both practical and theoretical exercises that enhance and elaborate upon the discussion in the text
* Foreword by Professor Helmut Pottmann, Vienna University of Technology

This book develops a crowdsourced sensor-cloud service composition framework taking into account spatio-temporal aspects. This book also unfolds new horizons to service-oriented computing towards the direction of crowdsourced sensor data based applications, in the broader context of Internet of Things (IoT). It is a massive challenge for the IoT research field how to effectively and efficiently capture, manage and deliver sensed data as user-desired services. The outcome of this research will contribute to solving this very important question, by designing a novel service framework and a set of unique service selection and composition frameworks. Delivering a novel service framework to manage crowdsourced sensor data provides high-level abstraction (i.e., sensor-cloud service) to model crowdsourced sensor data from functional and non-functional perspectives, seamlessly turning the raw data into "ready to go" services. A creative indexing model is developed to capture and manage the spatio-temporal dynamism of crowdsourced service providers. Delivering novel frameworks to compose crowdsourced sensor-cloud services is vital. These frameworks focuses on spatio-temporal composition of crowdsourced sensor-cloud services, which is a new territory for existing service oriented computing research. A creative failure-proof model is also designed to prevent composition failure caused by fluctuating QoS. Delivering an incentive model to drive the coverage of crowdsourced service providers is also vital. A new spatio-temporal incentive model targets changing coverage of the crowdsourced providers to achieve demanded coverage of crowdsourced sensor-cloud services within a region. The outcome of this research is expected to potentially create a sensor services crowdsourcing market and new commercial opportunities focusing on crowdsourced data based applications. The crowdsourced community based approach adds significant value to journey planning and map services thus creating a competitive edge for a technologically-minded companies incentivizing new start-ups, thus enabling higher market innovation. This book primarily targets researchers and practitioners, who conduct research work in service oriented computing, Internet of Things (IoT), smart city and spatio-temporal travel planning, as well as advanced-level students studying this field. Small and Medium Entrepreneurs, who invest in crowdsourced IoT services and journey planning infrastructures, will also want to purchase this book.

This book compiles contributions from renowned researchers covering all aspects of conceptual modeling, on the occasion of Arne Solvberg's 67th birthday. Friends of this pioneer in information systems modeling contribute their latest research results from such fields as data modeling, goal-oriented modeling, agent-oriented modeling, and process-oriented modeling. The book reflects the most important recent developments and application areas of conceptual modeling, and highlights trends in conceptual modeling for the next decade.

The pervasiveness of the Internet has had a significant impact on global politics, economics, and culture. To create a truly effective product in such a saturated digital environment, developers must study what has come before and how they can utilize existing tools to even greater effect. Evaluating Websites and Web Services: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on User Satisfaction explores some of the various approaches to the study and assessment of Internet technologies, providing scholars, researchers, developers, and professionals with critical knowledge and an interdisciplinary perspective on e-services in a variety of functional areas, from government and commerce to social media and education.

System-on-Chip Methodologies & Design Languages brings together a selection of the best papers from three international electronic design language conferences in 2000. The conferences are the Hardware Description Language Conference and Exhibition (HDLCon), held in the Silicon Valley area of USA; the Forum on Design Languages (FDL), held in Europe; and the Asia Pacific Chip Design Language (APChDL) Conference. The papers cover a range of topics, including design methods, specification and modeling languages, tool issues, formal verification, simulation and synthesis. The results presented in these papers will help researchers and practicing engineers keep abreast of developments in this rapidly evolving field.

Commutative Algebra, Singularities and Computer Algebra presents current trends in commutative algebra, algebraic combinatorics, singularity theory and computer algebra, and highlights the interaction between these disciplines. Contributions by leading international mathematicians thoroughly discuss topics in: modules theory, integrally closed ideals and determinantal ideals, singularities in projective spaces and Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity, Groebner and SAGBI basis, and the use of the computer packages Bergman, CoCoA and SINGULAR.

This book gives an overview of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), adapts related search algorithms and consistency algorithms for applications to multi-agent systems, and consolidates recent research devoted to cooperation in such systems. The techniques introduced are applied to various problems in multi-agent systems. Among the new approaches is a hybrid-type algorithm for weak-commitment search combining backtracking and iterative improvement; also, an extension of the basic CSP formalization called partial CSP is introduced in order to handle over-constrained CSPs.The book is written for advanced students and professionals interested in multi-agent systems or, more generally, in distributed artificial intelligence and constraint satisfaction. Researchers active in the area will appreciate this book as a valuable source of reference.

This book emphasizes methods, techniques and tools that can be used by typical software engineers in everyday projects. As the very popular UML language contains an assertion language (OCL), this language is presented and discussed with relation to other currently available assertion techniques. Currently these techniques are more widely used in late design and implementation phases. Here their role in analysis is emphasized. Assertion and scenario techniques are then combined into a single methodological framework. Finally a prototyping oriented model based on this framework is developed which helps to make sure that software fulfills user requirements.

Refinement is one of the cornerstones of the formal approach to software engineering, and its use in various domains has led to research on new applications and generalisation. This book brings together this important research in one volume, with the addition of examples drawn from different application areas. It covers four main themes: Data refinement and its application to Z Generalisations of refinement that change the interface and atomicity of operations Refinement in Object-Z Modelling state and behaviour by combining Object-Z with CSP Refinement in Z and Object-Z: Foundations and Advanced Applications provides an invaluable overview of recent research for academic and industrial researchers, lecturers teaching formal specification and development, industrial practitioners using formal methods in their work, and postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students. This second edition is a comprehensive update to the first and includes the following new material: Early chapters have been extended to also include trace refinement, based directly on partial relations rather than through totalisation Provides an updated discussion on divergence, non-atomic refinements and approximate refinement Includes a discussion of the differing semantics of operations and outputs and how they affect the abstraction of models written using Object-Z and CSP Presents a fuller account of the relationship between relational refinement and various models of refinement in CSP Bibliographic notes at the end of each chapter have been extended with the most up to date citations and research

xv From the Old to the New xvii Acknowledgments xxi 1 Verilog - A Tutorial Introduction 1 Getting Started 2 A Structural Description 2 Simulating the binaryToESeg Driver 4 Creating Ports For the Module 7 Creating a Testbench For a Module 8 11 Behavioral Modeling of Combinational Circuits Procedural Models 12 Rules for Synthesizing Combinational Circuits 13 14 Procedural Modeling of Clocked Sequential Circuits Modeling Finite State Machines 15 Rules for Synthesizing Sequential Systems 18 Non-Blocking Assignment ("

For over a decade, software process improvement (SPI) has been promoted as an approach to improve systematically the way software is developed and managed. Mostly this research and the relevant experience reports have been focussed on large software companies.

Conradi and his co-authors have collected the main results from four Norwegian industrial research and development projects on SPI carried out between 1996 and 2005, which, in contrast to other treatments, concentrated on small- and medium-sized companies, typically characterized by fast-changing environments and processes. The presentation is organized in five sections: general principles and methods of SPI, knowledge management for SPI, process modelling and electronic process guides, estimation methods, and object-oriented and component-based systems. A spectrum of empirical methods has been used, e.g. case studies, large-scale experiments, surveys and interviews, and action research.

The book mainly targets researchers and graduate students in (empirical) software engineering, and software professionals working in development or quality assurance.

One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in agent technology is that the concept of an agent, as an autonomous system capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. Just as we can understand many systems as being composed of essentially passive objects, which have a state and upon which we can perform operations, so we can understand many others as being made up of interacting semi-autonomous agents. This book brings together revised versions of papers presented at the First International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2000, held in Limerick, Ireland, in conjunction with ICSE 2000, and several invited papers. As a comprehensive and competent overview of agent-oriented software engineering, the book addresses software engineers interested in the new paradigm and technology as well as research and development professionals active in agent technology.

Object relationships in modern software systems are becoming increasingly numerous and complex, and program errors due to violations of object relationships are difficult to detect. Programmers need new tools that allow them to explore objects in a large system more efficiently and to detect broken object relationships instantaneously. Such tools incorporate approaches used in such areas as data visualization, pattern matching and extraction, database querying, active databases, and rule-based programming. The query-based debugging approach developed by the author of this book is another powerful yet efficient tool to be added to the developer's tool chest. Advanced Debugging Methods presents practice and tools for debugging computer programs. This book proposes new powerful approaches that simplify the daunting task of debugging complex software systems. Although debugging has been addressed in numerous research papers, many of its methods have yet to be explored in a book-length format. This book helps to fill this gap by presenting an overview of existing debugging tools with motivating examples and case studies, as well as presenting new, state-of-the-art debugging methods. Advanced Debugging Methods will be of use to software developers looking for tools to be applied in cutting edge practice; system architects looking at the relationship between software design and debugging; tools and programming language researchers looking for new ideas in run-time tool implementation as well as detailed descriptions of advanced implementations; and university professors and graduate students who will use this book as supplementary reading for graduate courses in programming tools, language implementation, and advanced object-oriented systems. Advanced Debugging Methods is also a handy reference of currently existing debugging methodologies as well as a springboard for cutting-edge research to simplify the difficult task of debugging and to facilitate the development of more robust software systems.

"Structured Finance: The Object Orientated Approach" is aimed at both the finance and IT professionals involved in the structured finance business with the intention of sharing common concepts and language within the industry. The financial community (structurers, pricers and risk managers) view structured products as collections of objects under the so-called "replicating portfolio" paradigm. The IT community use object oriented programming (OOP) techniques to improve the software updating and maintenance process. For them structured products are collections of objects as well. Despite use of the same "object" concept, it looks like communication between these different professional functions has been problematic. Recently, construction of standard data structures known as FpML has begun to lay out a common definition of objects, at least for "plain vanilla" derivatives, both between IT and financial people and across different market players. Along this line, this book builds upon the concept of "object" to provide frontier treatment of structured finance issues relevant to both communities engaged in building, pricing and hedging products and people engaged in designing and up-dating the corresponding software.

"Structured Finance: The Object Orientated Approach" will enable you to:

decompose a structured product in elementary constituent financial "objects" and risk factors ("replicating portfolio") understand the basics of object oriented programming (OOP) applied to the design of structured cash flows "objects" build your own "objects" and to understand FpML data structures available for standard products gauge risk exposures of the "objects" in structured products to: risk factors, their volatilities and the correlation among them (which factor are you long/short? Are you long/short volatility? Are you long/short correlation?) update your risk management system to accommodate structured products with non linear exposures and to design "objects" to represent, price and hedge, counterparty risk