In today's global economy, supply chains are an essential ingredient to corporate survival and growth. Operations strategy in supply chains must assume an ever-expanding and strategic role of risks that modern enterprises face when they operate in an interdependent supply chain environment. These operational and strategic facets entail a brand new set of operational problems and risks that have not always been understood or managed very well. It falls to supply chain managers to identify and to educate corporate managers on what these critical operational problems and risks involve. This book provides business students and practitioners with the means to understand, to model and to analyze these outstanding issues and problems that are the essential elements in managing supply chains today. This book will consider these problems in depth and draw essential conclusions regarding their management in supply chains. As a textbook treatment, it will examine traditional operational problems, expressing them in a strategic context, understanding their complexity, and recognizing their interdependency with other firms within a supply-chain environment. Used throughout the book will be application examples that illustrate all the aspects of dealing with and solving these kinds of problems. The content of SUPPLY CHAIN GAMES: Operations Management and Risk Valuation is presented in three sections, each of which will emphasize important facets of supply chain management operations. (1) Supply chains and operations modeling and management section will provide static and time models and their gradual extension to a supply chain environment. The section will give special attention tothe new concerns and issues at this level of analysis. (2) Inter-temporal supply chain management section will address this aspect as differential games. The differential games will be presented as natural continuous-time extensions of static models so that the effect of various types of dynamics on supply chains can be assessed and insights can be developed. (3) Risk and supply chain management section will deal with risk and supply chains as well as providing numerous applications regarding the management of interdependent operations and quality in a supply chain environment.

Soft computing has provided sophisticated methodologies for the development of intelligent decision support systems. Fast advances in soft computing technologies, such as fuzzy logic and systems, artificial neural networks and evolutionary computation, have made available powerful problem representation and modelling paradigms, and learning and optimisation mechanisms for addressing modern decision making issues. This book provides a comprehensive coverage of up-to-date conceptual frameworks in broadly perceived decision support systems and successful applications. Different from other existing books, this volume predominately focuses on applied decision support with soft computing. Areas covered include planning, management finance and administration in both the private and public sectors.

This is a comprehensive guide to fault injection techniques used to evaluate the dependability of a digital system. The description and the critical analysis of different fault injection techniques and tools are authored by key scientists in the field of system dependability and fault tolerance.

This proceedings volume of the ISEA 2006 examines sports engineering, an interdisciplinary subject which encompasses and integrates not only sports science and engineering but also biomechanics, physiology and anatomy, and motion physics. This is the first title of its kind in the emerging field of sports technology.

This book presents the results of several years' research work on how to characterize complexity in engineering design with a specific regard to dependency modeling. The 52 complexity metrics that are presented show different facets of how complexity takes shape in design processes. The metrics are supported by a modeling method and a measurement framework to employ the metrics in a goal-oriented manner. The detailed description of all involved metrics and models makes it possible to apply the analysis approach to common process modeling methodologies. Three case studies from automotive process management illustrate the application to facilitate the transfer to other cases in an industrial context. The comprehensive appendix supplies additional details and checklists for structural analysis to generate a complete overview of current means of structural analysis.

Written by experts in the field, the Non-Dispersive Infrared Gas Measurement begins with a brief survey of various gas measurement techniques and continues with fundamental aspects and cutting-edge progress in NDIR gas sensors in their historical development. Providing sufficient background information and details, the book Non-Dispersive Infrared Gas Measurement is an excellent resource for advanced level undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers, instrumentation engineers, applied physicists, chemists, material scientists in gas, chemical, biological, and medical sensors to have a comprehensive understanding of the development of non-dispersive infrared gas sensors and the trends for the future investigation.

Aviation networks play a critical role in the success of today's airlines and airports. This book provides insight on all aspects of modern network strategies and structures, ranging from market research to hub design, operations, organization, alliances, benchmarking, and antitrust issues. Considering both the airline and the airport perspectives, the book explains the economics of connectivity or productivity-driven hub structures through basic mathematics, which helps the reader to comprehend the structural strengths and weaknesses of aviation networks. More than 100 charts help clarify the topics at hand.

Proceedings of the 26th Symposium of the International Committee on Aeronautical Fatigue are a widely referenced summary of advances in aeronautical design against fatigue. This is a bi-annual event and the proceedings have been published in book form for over 35 years.

The unique focus of the book is the close symbiotic relationship between design and manufacture. It covers a large number of actual issues in the field by authors from the main research groups involved in developing methods, models and tools for the improvement of design and manufacturing processes in companies. It presents a selection of thirty-three papers ensuing from the fifth International Conference on Integrated Design and Manufacturing in Mechanical Engineering, held at the University of Bath, UK, in April 2004.

The contributions are divided in the following sections: two keynotes presenting the general synergies and relationships between the design and manufacturing processes through the concepts of production knowledge and integration; design strategies and methodologies, dealing with the critical element of knowledge in design and manufacturing processes and the methods with which designing can be undertaken collaboratively in an integrated manner; integrated design of manufacturing processes, which aim is to ensure a high quality product meeting all requirements, rapidly and at optimum cost; and design tools for particular applications in which texts optimising local decision have been grouped.

The book is of interest to academics, students and practitioners specialising in design and manufacturing issues in mechanical engineering, who will find it of the greatest interest to compare various points of view within the fields broached throughout the Conference. This volume is recommended as a reference textbook for all researchers in this field. It will give teachning staff confronted with training methodologies in integrated design and production a toolto assess the scope of the development prospects in an extremely wide ranging field.

The recent trend in user-customized product design requires the shape of products to be automatically adjusted according to the human body s shape, so that people will feel more comfortable when wearing these products. Geometric approaches can be used to design the freeform shape of products worn by people, which can greatly improve the efficiency of design processes in various industries involving customized products (e.g., garment design, toy design, jewel design, shoe design, and design of medical devices, etc.). These products are usually composed of very complex geometric shapes (represented by free-form surfaces), and are not driven by a parameter table but a digital human model with free-form shapes or part of human bodies (e.g., wrist, foot, and head models).

"Geometric Modeling and Reasoning of Human-Centered Freeform Products "introduces the algorithms of human body reconstruction, freeform product modeling, constraining and reconstructing freeform products, and shape optimization for improving the manufacturability of freeform products. Based on these techniques, the design automation problem for human-centered freeform products can be fundamentally solved.

Researchers and developers working on problems of automatic designing individually customized products can use this book as a reference, and it can also be used in courses in computer-aided product design at the graduate level."

Covers the entire process of risk management by providing methodologies for determining the sources of engineering project risk, and once threats have been identified, managing them through: identification and assessment (probability, relative importance, variables, risk breakdown structure, etc.); implementation of measures for their prevention, reduction or mitigation; evaluation of impacts and quantification of risks and establishment of control measures. It also considers sensitivity analysis to determine the influence of uncertain parameters values on different project results, such as completion time, total costs, etc. Case studies and examples across a wide spectrum of engineering projects discuss such diverse factors as: safety; environmental impacts; societal reactions; time and cost overruns; quality control; legal issues; financial considerations; and political risk, making this suitable for undergraduates and graduates in grasping the fundamentals of risk management.

Safety is a paradoxical system property. It remains immaterial, intangible and invisible until a failure, an accident or a catastrophy occurs and, too late, reveals its absence. And yet, a system cannot be relied upon unless its safety can be explained, demonstrated and certified. The practical and difficult questions which motivate this study concern the evidence and the arguments needed to justify the safety of a computer based system, or more generally its dependability. Dependability is a broad concept integrating properties such as safety, reliability, availability, maintainability and other related characteristics of the behaviour of a system in operation. How can we give the users the assurance that the system enjoys the required dependability? How should evidence be presented to certification bodies or regulatory authorities? What best practices should be applied? How should we decide whether there is enough evidence to justify the release of the system? To help answer these daunting questions, a method and a framework are proposed for the justification of the dependability of a computer-based system. The approach specifically aims at dealing with the difficulties raised by the validation of software. Hence, it should be of wide applicability despite being mainly based on the experience of assessing Nuclear Power Plant instrumentation and control systems important to safety. To be viable, a method must rest on a sound theoretical background.

Providing a comprehensive overview of various methods and applications in decision engineering, this book presents chapters written by a range experts in the field. It presents conceptual aspects of decision support applications in various areas including finance, vendor selection, construction, process management, water management and energy, agribusiness , production scheduling and control, and waste management. In addition to this, a special focus is given to methods of multi-criteria decision analysis. Decision making in organizations is a recurrent theme and is essential for business continuity. Managers from various fields including public, private, industrial, trading or service sectors are required to make decisions. Consequently managers need the support of these structured methods in order to engage in effective decision making. This book provides a valuable resource for graduate students, professors and researchers of decision analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis and group decision analysis. It is also intended for production engineers, civil engineers and engineering consultants.

Technology is normally pursued only as a practical subject in schools of engineering. Technology is move into the information society or age. Human is specialized in one respect or another. The ability to think abstractly, which allows the species to be at once specific and general. Technology is simply the applied science and the scientific discoveries that can easily converted into applications. Technology is by abstracting of specie characteristics from the natural process of organism.

At last, smaller chemical processing operations have truly easy access to process safety and risk management programs tailored to meet their needs. Written as a "how to" book with checklists, it offers sufficient information for managers of facilities with small chemical operations to implement a process safety program and meet existing regulations.

The recognized requirement for advancements in Concurrent Engineering for sustainable productivity enhancement (improved quality of life) can be viewed positively. The basic aim of productivity enhancement is changing, from primarily seeking collaborative enterprise engineered solutions through a more restricted short-term market view. Rather, it is looking forward to a more expansive truly concurrent engineering approach to development that must be adopted in order to synthesize all of the far-reaching requirements and implications relating to products and their intended operation, service provision and end-of-life. It is already evident in this new century that the desire for sustainable development is increasingly driving the market to reach for new and innovative solutions that more effectively utilize the resources we have inherited from previous generations; with the obvious responsibility to future generations.

There is a need to rethink the way in which we make things in order to revise the a ~cradle to gravea (TM) philosophy of the industrial revolution, which can be viewed as an extreme relative to naturea (TM)s principle of sustainable evolution. Human productivity and progress can be positively engineered and managed in harmony with the provision and needs of our natural environment. One century on from the industrial revolution, this is now the time of the sustainable revolution; requiring holistic technological, process and people integrated solutions to sustained socio-economic enhancement. It might surprise Albert Einstein that he rather well encapsulated the nature of this a ~evolutionary strugglea (TM) when he stated: "The world will not evolve past itscurrent state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation."

Collaborative Product and Service Life Cycle Management for a Sustainable World gathers together papers from the 15th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering (CE2008), to stimulate the new thinking that is so crucial to our sustained productivity enhancement and quality of life.

Technology-Assisted Neurorehabilitation introduces biomedical engineers, health professionals and researchers to the study and integration of neurorehabilitation advances, specifically focusing on applied technologies and mathematical methods. Coverage includes neuroanatomy and neuromodulation, robotic rehabilitation devices, signal processing, human-machine interfaces, software development, serious games and virtual reality. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, including real world applications and new trends. Both medical and technological fields are represented, with a focus on neurological disease. With the computerization of today's therapeutic technology, this book is a valuable asset to any student in the bioengineering or healthcare fields.

Based on the author's lecture notes and research, this well-illustrated and comprehensive text is one of the first to provide an introduction to image registration with particular emphasis on numerical methods in medical imaging. Ideal for researchers in industry and academia, it is also a suitable study guide for graduate mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, medical physicists, and radiologists. Image registration is utilised whenever information obtained from different viewpoints needs to be combined or compared and unwanted distortion needs to be eliminated. For example, CCTV images, ultrasound images, brain scan images, fingerprint and retinal scanning. Modersitzki's book provides a systematic introduction to the theoretical, practical, and numerical aspects of image registration, with special emphasis on medical applications. Various techniques are described, discussed and compared using numerous illustrations. The text starts with an introduction to the mathematical principles and the motivating example of the Human Neuroscanning Project whose aim is to build an atlas of the human brain through reconstructing essential information out of deformed images of sections of a prepared brain. The introduction is followed by coverage of parametric image registrations such as landmark based, principal axes based, and optimal affine linear registration. Basic distance measures like sum of squared differences, correlation, and mutual information are also discussed. The next section is devoted to state-of-the-art non-parametric image registrations where general variational based framework for image registration is presented and used to describe and compare well-known and new image registration techniques. Finally, efficient numerical schemes for the underlying partial differential equations are presented and discussed. This text treats the basic mathematical principles, including aspects from approximation theory, image processing, numerics, partial differential equations, and statistics, with a strong focus on numerical methods in image processing. Providing a systematic and general framework for image registration, the book not only presents state-of-the-art concepts but also summarises and classifies the numerous techniques to be found in the literature.

As the deep-ultraviolet (DUV) laser technology continues to mature, an increasing number of industrial and manufacturing applications are emerging. For example, the new generation of semiconductor inspection systems is being pushed to image at increasingly shorter DUV wavelengths to facilitate inspection of deep sub-micron features in integrated circuits. DUV-sensitive charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras are in demand for these applications. Although CCD cameras that are responsive at DUV wavelengths are now available, their long-term stability is still a major concern. This book describes the degradation mechanisms and long-term performance of CCDs in the DUV, along with new results of device performance at these wavelengths.

The papers in this book provide a unique state-of-the-art multidisciplinary overview on the subject of waves in pre-stressed materials through the interaction of several topics, ranging from the mathematical modelling of incremental material response (elastic and inelastic), to the analysis of the governing differential equations and boundary-value problems, and to computational methods for the solution to these problems, with particular reference to industrial, geophysical, and biomechanical applications.

A complete view on the title subject is proposed, including: The basic and fundamental theoretical issues (mechanical modelling, exact solutions, asymptotic methods, numerical treatment); A unified introduction to wave propagation (small on large and large on large); A look toward classical (such as geophysics and the mechanics of rubber-like solids) and emergent (such as biomechanics) applications.