This book presents the proceedings of the fifth International Symposium on Modelling and Implementation of Complex Systems (MISC 2018). The event was held in Laghouat, Algeria, on December 16-18, 2018. The 25 papers gathered here have been selected from 109 submissions using a strict peer-review process, and address a range of topics concerning the theory and applications of networking and distributed computing, including: cloud computing and the IoT, metaheuristics and optimization, computational intelligence, software engineering and formal methods.

The book consists of papers on selected topics of dependability analysis in computer systems and networks which were discussed during the 17th DepCoS-RELCOMEX conference held in Wroclaw, Poland, from June 27th to July 1st, 2022. Their collection will be an interesting source material for scientists, researchers, practitioners and students who are dealing with design, analysis and engineering of computer systems and networks and must ensure their dependable operation. Being probably the most complex technical systems ever engineered by man (and also, the most dynamically evolving ones), organization of contemporary computer systems and networks cannot be interpreted only as a structure built on the base of unreliable technical resources. Their evaluation must take into account a unique blend of interacting people, networks (together with mobile properties, cloud organization, Internet of Everything, etc.) and a large number of users dispersed geographically and constantly producing an unconceivable number of applications. Research methods being continuously developed for dependability analyses apply newest results of artificial and computational intelligence. Selection of papers in this book illustrates broad range of topics, often multi-disciplinary, which is considered in present-day dependability explorations; it also reveals an increasing role of the latest methods based on machine/deep learning and neural networks in these studies.

This book discusses online engineering and virtual instrumentation, typical working areas for today's engineers and inseparably connected with areas such as Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems, collaborative networks and grids, cyber cloud technologies, and service architectures, to name just a few. It presents the outcomes of the 14th International Conference on Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation (REV2017), held at Columbia University in New York from 15 to 17 March 2017. The conference addressed fundamentals, applications and experiences in the field of online engineering and virtual instrumentation in the light of growing interest in and need for teleworking, remote services and collaborative working environments as a result of the globalization of education. The book also discusses guidelines for education in university-level courses for these topics.

This book touches upon various aspects of a very interesting, and growing in popularity category of models of dynamical systems. These are the so-called fractional-order systems. Such models are not only relevant for many fields of science and technology, but may also find numerous applications in other disciplines applying the mathematical modelling tools. Thus, the book is intended for a very wide audience of professionals who want to expand their knowledge of systems modelling and its applications. The book includes the selections of papers presented at the International Conference on Fractional Calculus and its Applications organized by the Warsaw University of Technology and was held online on 6-8 September 2021. The International Conference on Fractional Calculus and its Applications (ICFDA) has an almost twenty years history. It started in Bordeaux (France) in 2004, followed by Porto (Portugal) 2006, Istanbul (Turkey) 2008, Badajoz (Spain) 2010, Nanjing (China) 2012, Catania (Italy) 2014, Novi Sad (Serbia) 2016, Amman (Jordan) 2018. Next ICFDA was planned in 2020 in Warsaw (Poland), but COVID-19 pandemic shifted it to 6-8 September 2021. Hence, the organizers were forced to change the form of the conference to the online one. In the volume twenty eight high-quality research papers presented during the ICFDA 2021 eleven Regular Sessions with an additional online Discussion Session are presented. The presented papers are scientifically inspiring, leading to new fruitful ideas. They cover a very broad range of many disciplines. Nowadays, and especially in such a subject as fractional calculus, it is very difficult to assign papers to specific scientific areas. So, many of the papers included have an interdisciplinary character.

This book offers a rigorous and self-contained presentation of stochastic integration and stochastic calculus within the general framework of continuous semimartingales. The main tools of stochastic calculus, including Ito's formula, the optional stopping theorem and Girsanov's theorem, are treated in detail alongside many illustrative examples. The book also contains an introduction to Markov processes, with applications to solutions of stochastic differential equations and to connections between Brownian motion and partial differential equations. The theory of local times of semimartingales is discussed in the last chapter. Since its invention by Ito, stochastic calculus has proven to be one of the most important techniques of modern probability theory, and has been used in the most recent theoretical advances as well as in applications to other fields such as mathematical finance. Brownian Motion, Martingales, and Stochastic Calculus provides a strong theoretical background to the reader interested in such developments. Beginning graduate or advanced undergraduate students will benefit from this detailed approach to an essential area of probability theory. The emphasis is on concise and efficient presentation, without any concession to mathematical rigor. The material has been taught by the author for several years in graduate courses at two of the most prestigious French universities. The fact that proofs are given with full details makes the book particularly suitable for self-study. The numerous exercises help the reader to get acquainted with the tools of stochastic calculus.

This book presents the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Frontiers of Intelligent Computing: Theory and Applications (FICTA 2017), held in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. The event brought together researchers, scientists, engineers, and practitioners to exchange their new ideas and experiences in the domain of intelligent computing theories with prospective applications to various engineering disciplines. The book is divided into two volumes: Information and Decision Sciences, and Intelligent Engineering Informatics. This volume covers broad areas of Intelligent Engineering Informatics, with papers exploring both the theoretical and practical aspects of various areas like ANN and genetic algorithms, human-computer interaction, intelligent control optimisation, intelligent e-learning systems, machine learning, mobile computing, multi-agent systems, etc. The book also offers a valuable resource for students at the post-graduate level in various engineering disciplines.

This volume is a collection of papers on emerging concepts, approaches and ideas in information systems research. It examines theoretical and methodological issues related to both information systems development in general and the complexity of information systems as socio-technical systems. The book draws on invited papers selected from the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Information Systems Development (ISD) held in Katowice, Poland, August 24 - 26, 2016. The invited conference papers were revised and expanded and present research that is focused on context, creativity, and cognition in information systems development. These issues are significant as they provide the basis for organizations to identify new markets, support innovative technology deployment, and enable mobile applications to detect, sense, interpret, and respond to the environment.

This book presents high-quality original contributions on positive systems, including topics such as: monotone dynamical systems in mathematical biology and game theory; mathematical developments for networked systems in biology, chemistry and the social sciences; linear and nonlinear positive operators; dynamical analysis, observation and control of positive distributed parameter systems; stochastic realization theory; biological systems with positive variables and positive controls; iterated function systems; nonnegative dynamic processes; and dimensioning problems for collaborative systems. The book comprises a selection of the best papers presented at the POSTA 2016, the 5th International Symposium on Positive Systems, which was held in Rome, Italy, in September 2016. This conference series represents a targeted response to the growing need for research that reports on and critically discusses a wide range of topics concerning the theory and applications of positive systems.

The era of advanced, automated and electric vehicles (AAEVs) has begun; the legal transformation is starting. In July 2018, parliament enacted the Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018, legislating for electric vehicle charging and allowing a direct civil claim against the motor insurer of an automated, ‘self-driving’ vehicle. In May 2022, the UK government announced its intention to create a new legal category for e-scooters. In April 2023, a ‘hands free’ advanced driver assistance system was approved for use on certain motorways across England, Wales and Scotland. Motor vehicle technologies have developed since the nineteenth century and have affected numerous aspects of our lives - from road safety to the environment, from the laws of civil liability to the rules of compulsory insurance. As AAEV technologies proliferate, their effects are likely to spread further, into legal areas less associated with motor vehicles such as equality and privacy. This book describes the emerging laws of advanced, automated and electric vehicles in England and Wales, explaining: - The development of motor vehicle laws (including vehicle specification law, the law of motor insurance and the laws of passenger transport) and putting new AAEV laws into their historical and legal contexts - The laws of civil and criminal liability relating to motor vehicles and how those laws are adapting to AAEVs - The public laws relating to motor vehicles which are likely to be affected by AAEVs, including environmental law and the laws of equality, of data protection and privacy This book will help those litigating, adjudicating, regulating and studying AAEV issues. It gives the context and detail of AAEV law in its many applications. It is a map to a fast-changing legal landscape. This title is included in Bloomsbury Professional’s Cyber Law online service.

This book presents the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Frontiers of Intelligent Computing: Theory and Applications (FICTA-2017), held in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. The event brought together researchers, scientists, engineers, and practitioners to exchange their new ideas and experiences in the domain of intelligent computing theories with prospective applications to various engineering disciplines. The book is divided into two volumes: Information and Decision Sciences, and Intelligent Engineering Informatics. This volume covers broad areas of Information and Decision Sciences, with papers exploring both the theoretical and practical aspects of data-intensive computing, data mining, evolutionary computation, knowledge management & networks, sensor networks, signal processing, wireless networks, protocols & architectures etc. The book also offers a valuable resource for students at the post-graduate level in various engineering disciplines.

This book presents the proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Dependability and Complex Systems (DepCoS-RELCOMEX), which took place in the Brunow Palace in Poland from 2nd to 6th July 2018. The conference has been organized at the Faculty of Electronics, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology since 2006, and it continues the tradition of two other events: RELCOMEX (1977-89) and Microcomputer School (1985-95). The selection of papers in these proceedings illustrates the broad variety of topics that are investigated in dependability analyses of today's complex systems. Dependability came naturally as a contemporary answer to new challenges in the reliability evaluation of these systems. Such systems cannot be considered only as structures (however complex and distributed) built on the basis of technical resources (hardware): their analysis must take into account a unique blend of interacting people (their needs and behaviours), networks (together with mobile properties, cloud-based systems) and a large number of users dispersed geographically and producing an unimaginable number of applications (working online). A growing number of research methods apply the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and computational intelligence (CI). Today's complex systems are really complex and are applied in numerous different fields of contemporary life.

This brief examines mathematical models in nonsmooth mechanics and nonregular electrical circuits, including evolution variational inequalities, complementarity systems, differential inclusions, second-order dynamics, Lur'e systems and Moreau's sweeping process. The field of nonsmooth dynamics is of great interest to mathematicians, mechanicians, automatic controllers and engineers. The present volume acknowledges this transversality and provides a multidisciplinary view as it outlines fundamental results in nonsmooth dynamics and explains how to use them to study various problems in engineering. In particular, the author explores the question of how to redefine the notion of dynamical systems in light of modern variational and nonsmooth analysis. With the aim of bridging between the communities of applied mathematicians, engineers and researchers in control theory and nonlinear systems, this brief outlines both relevant mathematical proofs and models in unilateral mechanics and electronics.

At the height of the Cold War, a new Soviet threat triggers a daring heist, and the stakes couldn't be higher'A defining novel of the genre and a lost classic' James SwallowBritish and American intelligence services have just learned of the Soviet Union's latest aircraft: the MiG-31. Codenamed "Firefox", the plane is a marvel of engineering - stealthy, hypersonic, with a thought-guided weapons system - outclassing anything flown by the West. Faced with Soviet air domination, MI6 and the CIA launch a daring mission to steal a Firefox prototype. Veteran US Air Force pilot Mitchell Gant, is sent to the Soviet Union under an assumed identity. He seems the perfect man for the job. But, deep within the icy heart of Soviet power, the stakes are overwhelming: fail this mission, and lose the war... Blending Cold War espionage suspense with high-altitude aerial action, Firefox is the original and greatest techno-thriller, from million-copy bestselling author Craig Thomas. Perfect for fans of Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. Praise for Firefox 'Firefox is as tense and exciting as they come' TLS 'Writes far better than Ludlum' Washington Post

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the latest advances in the mathematical theory and computational tools for modeling high-dimensional data drawn from one or multiple low-dimensional subspaces (or manifolds) and potentially corrupted by noise, gross errors, or outliers. This challenging task requires the development of new algebraic, geometric, statistical, and computational methods for efficient and robust estimation and segmentation of one or multiple subspaces. The book also presents interesting real-world applications of these new methods in image processing, image and video segmentation, face recognition and clustering, and hybrid system identification etc. This book is intended to serve as a textbook for graduate students and beginning researchers in data science, machine learning, computer vision, image and signal processing, and systems theory. It contains ample illustrations, examples, and exercises and is made largely self-contained with three Appendices which survey basic concepts and principles from statistics, optimization, and algebraic-geometry used in this book. Rene Vidal is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Vision Dynamics and Learning Lab at The Johns Hopkins University. Yi Ma is Executive Dean and Professor at the School of Information Science and Technology at ShanghaiTech University. S. Shankar Sastry is Dean of the College of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

This book reports on innovative research and developments in the broad field of transportation. It covers solutions relating to intelligent vehicles and infrastructure, energy and combustion management, vehicle dynamics and control, as well as research on human factors, logistics and security. Contributions are based on peer-reviewed papers presented at the 12th international scientific conference "Transbaltica: Transportation Science and Technology", held virtually from Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania, on September 16-17, 2021. All in all, this book offers extensive information on modern transport systems, with a good balance of theory and practice.

The advantages of periodic control have been known since humanity learned to cultivate crops in rotation to increase production. In more recent times, it has been recognized that some industrial and technological systems also work or function better in a periodic fashion. Moreover, with periodic control laws it has been possible to solve problems for which no time-invariant solution exists. Periodic models are also able to describe the intrinsic periodicity in many natural phenomena and time series.

Periodic Systems gives a comprehensive treatment of the theory of time-varying dynamical systems with periodic coefficients, including the problems of filtering and control.

Topics covered include:

a [ basic issues, including Floquet theory, controllability and observability, canonical decomposition, system norms and Lyapunov and robust stability;

a [ the problem of state estimation in its various forms, filtering, prediction and smoothing;

a [ control design methods, particularly optimal and robust control.

The text focuses on discrete-time signals and systems; however, an overview of the entire field, including the continuous-time case, is provided in the first chapter. The authorsa (TM) presentation of the theory and results is mathematically rigorous while maintaining a readable style, avoiding excessive formalism. This makes the book accessible to graduate students and researchers from the fields of engineering, physics, economics and mathematics.

This book systematically interprets and documents new, unifying principles and basic laws describing the most relevant aspects of hierarchy. To do so, it discusses recent experiments and models that are simple and realistic enough to reproduce the observations, and develops concepts for a better understanding of the complexity of systems consisting of many organisms. The book covers systems ranging from flocks of birds to groups of people. Although it focuses on hierarchical collective behavior in general, two aspects pop up in the majority of cases: collective motion and dynamically changing, partially directed networks (and the natural relation between the two). In addition, it offers a brief description of the most relevant definitions and concepts involved in the context of hierarchies, presenting both a review of the current literature and a number of new experimental and computational results in more detail. It is a valuable resource for students and scholars pursuing research on the structure of interactions within the collectives of animals and humans.

This book addresses the application of methods used in statistical physics to complex systems-from simple phenomenological analogies to more complex aspects, such as correlations, fluctuation-dissipation theorem, the concept of free energy, renormalization group approach and scaling. Statistical physics contains a well-developed formalism that describes phase transitions. It is useful to apply this formalism for damage phenomena as well. Fractals, the Ising model, percolation, damage mechanics, fluctuations, free energy formalism, renormalization group, and scaling, are some of the topics covered in Statistical Physics of Phase Transitions.

This book provides a general theoretical background for constructing the recursive Bayesian estimation algorithms for mixture models. It collects the recursive algorithms for estimating dynamic mixtures of various distributions and brings them in the unified form, providing a scheme for constructing the estimation algorithm for a mixture of components modeled by distributions with reproducible statistics. It offers the recursive estimation of dynamic mixtures, which are free of iterative processes and close to analytical solutions as much as possible. In addition, these methods can be used online and simultaneously perform learning, which improves their efficiency during estimation. The book includes detailed program codes for solving the presented theoretical tasks. Codes are implemented in the open source platform for engineering computations. The program codes given serve to illustrate the theory and demonstrate the work of the included algorithms.

Examines current and prospective challenges surrounding global challenges of education, energy, healthcare, security, and resilience This book discusses issues in large-scale systems in the United States and around the world. The authors examine the challenges of education, energy, healthcare, national security, and urban resilience. The book covers challenges in education including America's use of educational funds, standardized testing, and the use of classroom technology. On the topic of energy, this book examines debates on climate, the current and future developments of the nuclear power industry, the benefits and cost decline of natural gases, and the promise of renewable energy. The authors also discuss national security, focusing on the issues of nuclear weapons, terrorism and cyber security. Urban resilience is addressed in the context of natural threats such as hurricanes and floods. * Studies the usage of a globalized benchmark for both student and pedagogical performance * Covers topics such as surveillance, operational capabilities, movement of resources, and the pros and cons of globalization * Examines big data, evolving medical methodologies and effects on the medical educational curriculum, and the positive effects of electronic records in healthcare data Perspectives on Complex Global Challenges: Education, Energy Healthcare, Security, and Resilience serves as a reference for government officials, personnel in security, business executives and system engineers.

The book examines the future deployment of renewable power from a normative point of view. It identifies properties characterizing the cost-optimal transition towards a renewable power system and analyzes the key drivers behind this transition. Among those drivers, particular attention is paid to technological cost reductions and the implications of uncertainty. From a methodological perspective, the main contributions of this book relate to the field of endogenous learning and uncertainty in optimizing energy system models. The primary objective here is closing the gap between the strand of literature covering renewable potential analyses on the one side and energy system modeling with endogenous technological change on the other side. The models applied in this book demonstrate that fundamental changes must occur to transform today's power sector into a more sustainable one over the course of this century. Apart from its methodological contributions, this work is also intended to provide practically relevant insights regarding the long-term competitiveness of renewable power generation.

In some cases, certain coherent structures can exist in stochastic dynamic systems almost in every particular realization of random parameters describing these systems. Dynamic localization in one-dimensional dynamic systems, vortexgenesis (vortex production) in hydrodynamic flows, and phenomenon of clustering of various fields in random media (i.e., appearance of small regions with enhanced content of the field against the nearly vanishing background of this field in the remaining portion of space) are examples of such structure formation. The general methodology presented in Volume 1 is used in Volume 2 Coherent Phenomena in Stochastic Dynamic Systems to expound the theory of these phenomena in some specific fields of stochastic science, among which are hydrodynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, acoustics, optics, and radiophysics. The material of this volume includes particle and field clustering in the cases of scalar (density field) and vector (magnetic field) passive tracers in a random velocity field, dynamic localization of plane waves in layered random media, as well as monochromatic wave propagation and caustic structure formation in random media in terms of the scalar parabolic equation.

The beginning of the 21st century can be characterized as the" time-delay boom" leading to numerous important results. The purpose of this book is two-fold, to familiarize the non-expert reader with time-delay systems and to provide a systematic treatment of modern ideas and techniques for experts. This book is based on the course "Introduction to time-delay systems" for graduate students in Engineering and Applied Mathematics that the author taught in Tel Aviv University in 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 academic years. The sufficient background to follow most of the material are the undergraduate courses in mathematics and an introduction to control. The book leads the reader from some basic classical results on time-delay systems to recent developments on Lyapunov-based analysis and design with applications to the hot topics of sampled-data and network-based control. The objective is to provide useful tools that will allow the reader not only to apply the existing methods, but also to develop new ones. It should be of interest for researchers working in the field, for graduate students in engineering and applied mathematics, and for practicing engineers. It may also be used as a textbook for a graduate course on time-delay systems.

This book is an introduction to maximum-entropy models of random graphs with given topological properties and their applications. Its original contribution is the reformulation of many seemingly different problems in the study of both real networks and graph theory within the unified framework of maximum entropy. Particular emphasis is put on the detection of structural patterns in real networks, on the reconstruction of the properties of networks from partial information, and on the enumeration and sampling of graphs with given properties. After a first introductory chapter explaining the motivation, focus, aim and message of the book, chapter 2 introduces the formal construction of maximum-entropy ensembles of graphs with local topological constraints. Chapter 3 focuses on the problem of pattern detection in real networks and provides a powerful way to disentangle nontrivial higher-order structural features from those that can be traced back to simpler local constraints. Chapter 4 focuses on the problem of network reconstruction and introduces various advanced techniques to reliably infer the topology of a network from partial local information. Chapter 5 is devoted to the reformulation of certain "hard" combinatorial operations, such as the enumeration and unbiased sampling of graphs with given constraints, within a "softened" maximum-entropy framework. A final chapter offers various overarching remarks and take-home messages.By requiring no prior knowledge of network theory, the book targets a broad audience ranging from PhD students approaching these topics for the first time to senior researchers interested in the application of advanced network techniques to their field.

Niklas Luhmann ranks as one of the most important sociologists and social theorists of the twentieth century. Through his many books he developed a highly original form of systems theory that has been hugely influential in a wide variety of disciplines.

In "Introduction to Systems Theory," Luhmann explains the key ideas of general and sociological systems theory and supplies a wealth of examples to illustrate his approach. The book offers a wide range of concepts and theorems that can be applied to politics and the economy, religion and science, art and education, organization and the family. Moreover, Luhmann's ideas address important contemporary issues in such diverse fields as cognitive science, ecology, and the study of social movements.

This book provides all the necessary resources for readers to work through the foundations of systems theory - no other work by Luhmann is as clear and accessible as this. There is also much here that will be of great interest to more advanced scholars and practitioners in sociology and the social sciences.