"SSM offers an elegantly simple approach that is both powerful, yet non-threatening and one that forces organisations to confront questions essential to their very survival such as, "Are we doing the right thing?"
From the Foreword by Mike Duffy, Operations Director, The Smith Group

Since its inception more than thirty years ago, the benefits of using Soft Systems Methodology for problem solving has gained worldwide recognition. Yet, despite recognising the importance of SSM, students and practitioners still experience considerable difficulty with the intellectual process involved.

Based on a lifetime experience as an academic and consultant, Brian Wilson provides guidance on how to develop a range of conceptual models across a variety of business problems. Building on his earlier work in Systems: Concepts, Methodologies and Applications he takes a practical approach to the topic based on the premise that all organisations are unique. He develops concepts to articulate ways of thinking about complexity. These are an alternative to mathematically-based concepts, and they offer rigorous, and defensible ways of answering the question 'What do we take the organisation to be?' A model of the most appropriate and relevant concept for your own organisation can then be successfully developed and applied.

Of relevance to organisations of any type, or any size, this book shows how model building within SSM can be used to cope with real-life problems. It will be an invaluable resource for students and practitioners in both the public and private sectors.

The definitive guide to control system design

Modern Control System Theory and Design, Second Edition offers the most comprehensive treatment of control systems available today. Its unique text/software combination integrates classical and modern control system theories, while promoting an interactive, computer-based approach to design solutions. The sheer volume of practical examples, as well as the hundreds of illustrations of control systems from all engineering fields, make this volume accessible to students and indispensable for professional engineers.

This fully updated Second Edition features a new chapter on modern control system design, including state-space design techniques, Ackermann's formula for pole placement, estimation, robust control, and the H method for control system design. Other notable additions to this edition are:

• Free MATLAB software containing problem solutions, which can be retrieved from The Mathworks, Inc., anonymous FTP server at ftp://ftp.mathworks.com/pub/books/shinners
• Programs and tutorials on the use of MATLAB incorporated directly into the text
• A complete set of working digital computer programs
• Reviews of commercial software packages for control system analysis
• An extensive set of new, worked-out, illustrative solutions added in dedicated sections at the end of chapters
• Expanded end-of-chapter problems—one-third with answers to facilitate self-study
• An updated solutions manual containing solutions to the remaining two-thirds of the problems

Superbly organized and easy-to-use, Modern Control System Theory and Design, Second Edition is an ideal textbook for introductory courses in control systems and an excellent professional reference. Its interdisciplinary approach makes it invaluable for practicing engineers in electrical, mechanical, aeronautical, chemical, and nuclear engineering and related areas.

The extraordinary growth of the Internet and other information age developments in communications, particularly marketing communications, are transforming the international and national business environments. This work is designed to help people, whether with large corporations or the smallest of enterprises, to venture with confidence into cyberspace. Written in non-technical language by a businessman for other business people, the information seizes on the many opportunities emerging for enterprises and personal career development. The socio-economic impact is covered from important perspectives, such as the impact on the Third World. The book heralds an age in which information becomes an internationally marketable commodity, and gives individual entrepreneurs on miniscule budgets the tools to compete against the big corporate guns on a level playing field. The appendices include useful electronic mailing lists, a product protection and order delivery system on the Web, and details on getting connected in the UK.

This book is based on a number of systems concepts, of which the following are emphasized here: oThe interacting systems of society and the environment are dynamic and evolution ary oEvolution of these systems carries them through stages of differential stability and instability, continuity and discontinuity oAssociated with evolution and instability is structural change that is essentially irre versible oThe present is a stage of world transformation that may not have been equaled for decades or even centuries oPolicies and decisions must match the times, in the present case the stage of world transformation The time 11:59:59 PM, approximately, on December 31, 2000 has an impor tant symbolic meaning. It marks the end of a minute, the end of an hour, the end of a day, the end of a year, the end of a decade, the end of a century, and the end of a millennium. The time and date provide a convenient yardstick against which we can evaluate the evolution of our thinking and the adequacy of our assumptions, mental models, paradigms, and policies. Will the beginning tum out to be appropriately dif ferent from the end? We hope that this book is helpful in such evaluation. This is a new-paradigm book, which both presents and advances the new way of thinking about the systems of science, technology, society, economics, politics, and the environment, and actively calls for the replacement of the worn out cognitive/sociotechnical paradigm."

This book develops a mathematical framework for modeling and optimizing interference-coupled multiuser systems. At the core of this framework is the concept of general interference functions, which provides a simple means of characterizing interdependencies between users. The entire analysis builds on the two core axioms scale-invariance and monotonicity.
The proposed network calculus has its roots in power control theory and wireless communications. It adds theoretical tools for analyzing the typical behavior of interference-coupled networks. In this way it complements existing game-theoretic approaches.
The framework should also be viewed in conjunction with optimization theory. There is a fruitful interplay between the theory of interference functions and convex optimization theory. By jointly exploiting the properties of interference functions, it is possible to design algorithms that outperform general-purpose techniques that only exploit convexity.
The title "network calculus" refers to the fact that the theory of interference functions constitutes a generic theoretical framework for the analysis of interference coupled systems. Certain operations within the framework are "closed," that is, combinations of interference functions are interference functions again. Also, certain properties are preserved under such operations. This, provides a methodology for analyzing different multiuser performance measures that can be expressed as interference functions or combinations of interference functions.

Malicious hackers utilize the World Wide Web to share knowledge. Analyzing the online communication of these threat actors can help reduce the risk of attacks. This book shifts attention from the defender environment to the attacker environment, offering a new security paradigm of 'proactive cyber threat intelligence' that allows defenders of computer networks to gain a better understanding of their adversaries by analyzing assets, capabilities, and interest of malicious hackers. The authors propose models, techniques, and frameworks based on threat intelligence mined from the heart of the underground cyber world: the malicious hacker communities. They provide insights into the hackers themselves and the groups they form dynamically in the act of exchanging ideas and techniques, buying or selling malware, and exploits. The book covers both methodology - a hybridization of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and social network analysis methods - and the resulting conclusions, detailing how a deep understanding of malicious hacker communities can be the key to designing better attack prediction systems.

This book provides the basic concepts and fundamental principles of dynamic systems including experimental methods, calibration, signal conditioning, data acquisition and processing as well as the results presentation. How to select suitable sensors to measure is also introduced. It is an essential reference to students, lecturers, professionals and any interested lay readers in measurement technology.

This book presents the various design methods of a state-feedback control law and of an observer. The considered systems are of continuous-time and of discrete-time nature, monovariable or multivariable, the last ones being of main consideration. Three different approaches are described: * Linear design methods, with an emphasis on decoupling strategies, and a general formula for multivariable controller or observer design; * Quadratic optimization methods: Linear Quadratic Control (LQC), optimal Kalman filtering, Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control; * Linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) to solve linear and quadratic problems. The duality between control and observation is taken to advantage and extended up to the mathematical domain. A large number of exercises, all given with their detailed solutions, mostly obtained with MATLAB, reinforce and exemplify the practical orientation of this book. The programs, created by the author for their solving, are available on the Internet sites of Springer and of MathWorks for downloading. This book is targeted at students of Engineering Schools or Universities, at the Master's level, at engineers desiring to design and implement innovative control methods, and at researchers.

These Proceedings offer a selection of peer-reviewed research and survey papers by some of the foremost international researchers in the fields of finance, energy, stochastics and risk, who present their latest findings on topical problems. The papers cover the areas of stochastic modeling in energy and financial markets; risk management with environmental factors from a stochastic control perspective; and valuation and hedging of derivatives in markets dominated by renewables, all of which further develop the theory of stochastic analysis and mathematical finance. The papers were presented at the first conference on "Stochastics of Environmental and Financial Economics (SEFE)", being part of the activity in the SEFE research group of the Centre of Advanced Study (CAS) at the Academy of Sciences in Oslo, Norway during the 2014/2015 academic year.

Self-organization of matter is observed in every context and on all scales, from the nanoscale of quantum fields and subatomic particles to the macroscale of galaxy superclusters. This book analyzes the wide range of patterns of organization present in nature, highlighting their similarities rather than their differences. This unconventional approach results in an illuminating read which should be part of any Physics student's background.

This book introduces and discusses the analysis of interacting many-body complex systems exhibiting spontaneous synchronization from the perspective of nonequilibrium statistical physics. While such systems have been mostly studied using dynamical system theory, the book underlines the usefulness of the statistical physics approach to obtain insightful results in a number of representative dynamical settings. Although it is intractable to follow the dynamics of a particular initial condition, statistical physics allows to derive exact analytical results in the limit of an infinite number of interacting units. Chapter one discusses dynamical characterization of individual units of synchronizing systems as well as of their interaction and summarizes the relevant tools of statistical physics. The latter are then used in chapters two and three to discuss respectively synchronizing systems with either a first- or a second-order evolution in time. This book provides a timely introduction to the subject and is meant for the uninitiated as well as for experienced researchers working in areas of nonlinear dynamics and chaos, statistical physics, and complex systems.

This book provides a broad overview of state-of-the-art research at the intersection of the Koopman operator theory and control theory. It also reviews novel theoretical results obtained and efficient numerical methods developed within the framework of Koopman operator theory. The contributions discuss the latest findings and techniques in several areas of control theory, including model predictive control, optimal control, observer design, systems identification and structural analysis of controlled systems, addressing both theoretical and numerical aspects and presenting open research directions, as well as detailed numerical schemes and data-driven methods. Each contribution addresses a specific problem. After a brief introduction of the Koopman operator framework, including basic notions and definitions, the book explores numerical methods, such as the dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) algorithm and Arnoldi-based methods, which are used to represent the operator in a finite-dimensional basis and to compute its spectral properties from data. The main body of the book is divided into three parts: theoretical results and numerical techniques for observer design, synthesis analysis, stability analysis, parameter estimation, and identification; data-driven techniques based on DMD, which extract the spectral properties of the Koopman operator from data for the structural analysis of controlled systems; and Koopman operator techniques with specific applications in systems and control, which range from heat transfer analysis to robot control. A useful reference resource on the Koopman operator theory for control theorists and practitioners, the book is also of interest to graduate students, researchers, and engineers looking for an introduction to a novel and comprehensive approach to systems and control, from pure theory to data-driven methods.

This new edition provides an up-to-date coverage of important theoretical models in the scheduling literature as well as significant scheduling problems that occur in the real world. It again includes supplementary material in the form of slide-shows from industry and movies that show implementations of scheduling systems. The main structure of the book as per previous edition consists of three parts. The first part focuses on deterministic scheduling and the related combinatorial problems. The second part covers probabilistic scheduling models; in this part it is assumed that processing times and other problem data are random and not known in advance. The third part deals with scheduling in practice; it covers heuristics that are popular with practitioners and discusses system design and implementation issues. All three parts of this new edition have been revamped and streamlined. The references have been made completely up-to-date. Theoreticians and practitioners alike will find this book of interest. Graduate students in operations management, operations research, industrial engineering, and computer science will find the book an accessible and invaluable resource. Scheduling - Theory, Algorithms, and Systems will serve as an essential reference for professionals working on scheduling problems in manufacturing, services, and other environments.

This book reports on cutting-edge research into innovative system interfaces, highlighting both lifecycle development and human-technology interaction, especially in virtual, augmented and mixed-reality systems. It describes advanced methodologies and tools for evaluating and improving interface usability and discusses new models, as well as case studies and good practices. The book addresses the human, hardware, and software factors in the process of developing interfaces for optimizing total system performance, while minimizing their costs. It also highlights the forces currently shaping the nature of computing and systems, such as: the importance of portability and technologies for reducing power requirements; the necessity of a better assimilation of computation in the environment; as well as solutions to promote accessibility to computers and systems for people with special needs. The book, which is based on the AHFE 2019 International Conference on Human Factors and Systems Interaction, held on July 24-28, 2019, in Washington D.C., USA, offers a timely survey and practice-oriented guide for systems interface users and developers alike.

This book presents papers on various problems of dependability in computer systems and networks that were discussed at the 14th DepCoS-RELCOMEX conference, in Brunow, Poland, from 1st to 5th July 2019. Discussing new ideas, research results and developments in the design, implementation, maintenance and analysis of complex computer systems, it is of interest to researchers and practitioners who are dealing with dependability issues in such systems. Dependability analysis came as a response to new challenges in the evaluation of contemporary complex systems, which should be considered as systems of people - with their needs and behaviours -interacting with technical communication channels (such as mobile activities, iCloud, Internet of Everything) and online applications, often operating in hostile environments. The diversity of topics covered, illustrates the variety of methods used in this area, often with the help of the latest results in artificial and computational intelligence.

Recent developments in model-predictive control promise remarkable opportunities for designing multi-input, multi-output control systems and improving the control of single-input, single-output systems. This volume provides a definitive survey of the latest model-predictive control methods available to engineers and scientists today. The initial set of chapters present various methods for managing uncertainty in systems, including stochastic model-predictive control. With the advent of affordable and fast computation, control engineers now need to think about using "computationally intensive controls," so the second part of this book addresses the solution of optimization problems in "real" time for model-predictive control. The theory and applications of control theory often influence each other, so the last section of Handbook of Model Predictive Control rounds out the book with representative applications to automobiles, healthcare, robotics, and finance. The chapters in this volume will be useful to working engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, as well as students and faculty interested in the progression of control theory. Future developments in MPC will no doubt build from concepts demonstrated in this book and anyone with an interest in MPC will find fruitful information and suggestions for additional reading.

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.

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.