This volume presents some recent and principal developments related to computational intelligence and optimization methods in control. Theoretical aspects and practical applications of control engineering are covered by 14 self-contained contributions. Additional gems include the discussion of future directions and research perspectives designed to add to the reader's understanding of both the challenges faced in control engineering and the insights into the developing of new techniques. With the knowledge obtained, readers are encouraged to determine the appropriate control method for specific applications.

Whether by synergy or by synthesis, development and technology are becoming synonymous in every domain. Cases on Transnational Learning and Technologically Enabled Environments reports on national and international initiatives undertaken to adapt advancements in information and communication technology and successfully face the challenges posed by various social and economic forces. The international research in this book represents instances of institutions that are in transition as well as those that are readily using technology in education.

Scheduling theory has received a growing interest since its origins in the second half of the 20th century. Developed initially for the study of scheduling problems with a single objective, the theory has been recently extended to problems involving multiple criteria. However, this extension has still left a gap between the classical multi-criteria approaches and some real-life problems in which not all jobs contribute to the evaluation of each criterion.

In this book, we close this gap by presenting and developing multi-agent scheduling models in which subsets of jobs sharing the same resources are evaluated by different criteria. Several scenarios are introduced, depending on the definition and the intersection structure of the job subsets. Complexity results, approximation schemes, heuristics and exact algorithms are discussed for single-machine and parallel-machine scheduling environments. Definitions and algorithms are illustrated with the help of examples and figures.

Increasing numbers of businesses and Information Technology firms are outsourcing their software and Web development tasks. It is has been estimated that currently half of the Fortune 500 companies have utilized outsourcing for their development needs and estimates that by the end of 2008, 40% of U.S. companies will either develop, test, support, or store software overseas, with another 40% considering doing the same. Several industries, from computer software to telemarketing, have begun aggressively shifting white-collar work out of the United States. The United States currently accounts for more than half of worldwide spending on IT outsourcing, with a growing portion of this spending going to countries such as India, Russia, and the Philippines, and this trend will continue. Research has indicated that the primary problem is language because of idiomatic expressions and subtle cultural nuances associated with the use of particular words. Thus communication frequently breaks down when dealing with overseas companies.

'Rough Computing' explores the application of rough set theory, which has attracted attention because of the ability to enhance databases by allowing for the management of uncertainty, a comparative analysis between rough sets, and other intelligent data analysis.

Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal knowledge management are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed.

During the last decade, research and applications based on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has raised a very interesting debate about their capacity and limitations to represent conceptual structures in the legal domain. Making conceptual legal knowledge explicit would support the development of a web of legal knowledge, improve communication, create trust and enable and support open data, e-government and e-democracy activities. Moreover, this explicit knowledge is also relevant to the formalization of software agents and the shaping of virtual institutions and multi-agent systems or environments.

This book explores the use of ontologism in legal knowledge representation for semantically-enhanced legal knowledge systems or web-based applications. In it, current methodologies, tools and languages used for ontology development are revised, and the book includes an exhaustive revision of existing ontologies in the legal domain. The development of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) is presented as a case study.
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Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as a correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfill two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic: there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic and language.

This book deals with the problem of finding suitable languages that can represent specific classes of Petri nets, the most studied and widely accepted model for distributed systems. Hence, the contribution of this book amounts to the alphabetization of some classes of distributed systems. The book also suggests the need for a generalization of Turing computability theory. It is important for graduate students and researchers engaged with the concurrent semantics of distributed communicating systems. The author assumes some prior knowledge of formal languages and theoretical computer science.

Although 3D printing technologies are still a rarity in many classrooms and other educational settings, their far-reaching applications across a wide range of subjects make them a desirable instructional aid. Effective implementation of these technologies can engage learners through project-based learning and exploration of objects. Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives on 3D Printing in Education is a collection of advanced research that facilitates discussions on interdisciplinary fields and international perspectives, from kindergarten to higher education, to inform the uses of 3D printing in education from diverse and broad perspectives. Covering topics such as computer-aided software, learning theories, and educational policy, this book is ideally designed for educators, practitioners, instructional designers, and researchers.

This is the first book devoted to the task of computing integrability structures by computer. The symbolic computation of integrability operator is a computationally hard problem and the book covers a huge number of situations through tutorials. The mathematical part of the book is a new approach to integrability structures that allows to treat all of them in a unified way. The software is an official package of Reduce. Reduce is free software, so everybody can download it and make experiments using the programs available at our website.

Tearing and interconnecting methods, such as FETI, FETI-DP, BETI, etc., are among the most successful domain decomposition solvers for partial differential equations. The purpose of this book is to give a detailed and self-contained presentation of these methods, including the corresponding algorithms as well as a rigorous convergence theory. In particular, two issues are addressed that have not been covered in any monograph yet: the coupling of finite and boundary elements within the tearing and interconnecting framework including exterior problems, and the case of highly varying (multiscale) coefficients not resolved by the subdomain partitioning. In this context, the book offers a detailed view to an active and up-to-date area of research.

Since its first volume in 1960, Advances in Computers has presented detailed coverage of innovations in computer hardware, software, theory, design, and applications. It has also provided contributors with a medium in which they can explore their subjects in greater depth and breadth than journal articles usually allow. As a result, many articles have become standard references that continue to be of sugnificant, lasting value in this rapidly expanding field.
In-depth surveys and tutorials on new computer technologyWell-known authors and researchers in the fieldExtensive bibliographies with most chaptersMany of the volumes are devoted to single themes or subfields of computer science

In recent years, IT standardization has become increasingly complex as a result of globalization, widespread Internet use, and the economic importance of standards. New Applications in IT Standards: Developments and Progress unites contributions on all facets of standards research, providing essential research on developing, teaching, and implementing standards in global organizations and institutions. Researchers can benefit from specific cases, frameworks, and new theories in IT standards studies.

"The healthcare industry in the United States consumes roughly 20% of the gross national product per year. This huge expenditure not only represents a large portion of the country's collective interests, but also an enormous amount of medical information. Information intensive healthcare enterprises have unique issues related to the collection, disbursement, and integration of various data within the healthcare system.Information Systems and Healthcare Enterprises provides insight on the challenges arising from the adaptation of information systems to the healthcare industry, including development, design, usage, adoption, expansion, and compliance with industry regulations. Highlighting the role of healthcare information systems in fighting healthcare fraud and the role of information technology and vendors, this book will be a highly valued addition to academic, medical, and health science libraries."

This monograph presents examples of best practices when combining bioinspired algorithms with parallel architectures. The book includes recent work by leading researchers in the field and offers a map with the main paths already explored and new ways towards the future. Parallel Architectures and Bioinspired Algorithms will be of value to both specialists in Bioinspired Algorithms, Parallel and Distributed Computing, as well as computer science students trying to understand the present and the future of Parallel Architectures and Bioinspired Algorithms.

Information is an important concept that is studied extensively across a range of disciplines, from the physical sciences to genetics to psychology to epistemology. Information continues to increase in importance, and the present age has been referred to as the "Information Age."

One may understand information in a variety of ways. For some, information is found in facts that were previously unknown. For others, a fact must have some economic value to be considered information. Other people emphasize the movement through a communication channel from one location to another when describing information. In all of these instances, information is the set of characteristics of the output of a process. Yet Information has seldom been studied in a consistent way across different disciplines.

"Information from Processes" provides a discipline-independent and precise presentation of both information and computing processes. Information concepts and phenomena are examined in an effort to understand them, given a hierarchy of information processes, where one process uses others. Research about processes and computing is applied to answer the question of what information can and cannot be produced, and to determine the nature of this information (theoretical information science). The book also presents some of the basic processes that are used in specific domains (applied information science), such as those that generate information in areas like reasoning, the evolution of informative systems, cryptography, knowledge, natural language, and the economic value of information.Written for researchers and graduate students in information science and related fields, "Information from Processes "details a unique information model independent from other concepts in computer or archival science, which is thus applicable to a wide range of domains. Combining theoretical and empirical methods as well as psychological, mathematical, philosophical, and economic techniques, Losee's book delivers a solid basis and starting point for future discussions and research about the creation and use of information."

This book presents the latest research advances in complex network structure analytics based on computational intelligence (CI) approaches, particularly evolutionary optimization. Most if not all network issues are actually optimization problems, which are mostly NP-hard and challenge conventional optimization techniques. To effectively and efficiently solve these hard optimization problems, CI based network structure analytics offer significant advantages over conventional network analytics techniques. Meanwhile, using CI techniques may facilitate smart decision making by providing multiple options to choose from, while conventional methods can only offer a decision maker a single suggestion. In addition, CI based network structure analytics can greatly facilitate network modeling and analysis. And employing CI techniques to resolve network issues is likely to inspire other fields of study such as recommender systems, system biology, etc., which will in turn expand CI's scope and applications. As a comprehensive text, the book covers a range of key topics, including network community discovery, evolutionary optimization, network structure balance analytics, network robustness analytics, community-based personalized recommendation, influence maximization, and biological network alignment. Offering a rich blend of theory and practice, the book is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners interested in network analytics and computational intelligence, both as a textbook and as a reference work.

Fuzzy Cluster Analysis presents advanced and powerful fuzzy clustering techniques. This thorough and self-contained introduction to fuzzy clustering methods and applications covers classification, image recognition, data analysis and rule generation. Combining theoretical and practical perspectives, each method is analysed in detail and fully illustrated with examples. Features include:

• Sections on inducing fuzzy if-then rules by fuzzy clustering and non-alternating optimization fuzzy clustering algorithms
• Discussion of solid fuzzy clustering techniques like the fuzzy c-means, the Gustafson-Kessel and the Gath-and-Geva algorithm for classification problems
• Focus on linear and shell clustering techniques used for detecting contours in image analysis
• Accompanying software and data sets pertaining to the examples presented, enabling the reader to learn through experimentation
• Examination of the difficulties involved in evaluating the results of fuzzy cluster analysis and of determining the number of clusters with analysis of global and local validity measures
• Description of different fuzzy clustering techniques allowing the user to select the method most appropriate to a particular problem

This book surveys the recent development of maintenance theory, advanced maintenance techniques with shock and damage models, and their applications in computer systems dealing with efficiency problems. It also equips readers to handle multiple maintenance, informs maintenance policies, and explores comparative methods for several different kinds of maintenance. Further, it discusses shock and damage modelling as an important failure mechanism for reliability systems, and extensively explores the degradation processes, failure modes, and maintenance characteristics of modern, highly complex systems, especially for some key mechanical systems designed for specific tasks.

Modelling for Business Improvement contains the proceedings of the First International Conference on Process Modelling and Process Management (MMEP 2010) held in Cambridge, England, in March 2010. It contains contributions from an international group of leading researchers in the fields of process modelling and process management. This conference will showcase recent trends in the modelling and management of engineering processes, explore potential synergies between different modelling approaches, gather and discuss future challenges for the management of engineering processes and discuss future research areas and topics. Modelling for Business Improvement is divided into three main parts: theoretical foundation of modelling and management of engineering processes, and achievements in theory; experiences from management practice using various modelling methods and tools, and their future challenges; and, new perspectives on modelling methods, techniques and tools. Based on the latest achievements in this and related fields, the editors aim to landmark the research map for modelling and management of engineering processes for 2020.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th IFIP WG 5.5/SOCOLNET Advanced Doctoral Conference on Computing, Electrical and Industrial Systems, DoCEIS 2016, held in Costa de Caparica, Portugal, in April 2016. The 53 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 112 submissions. The papers present selected results produced in engineering doctoral programs and focus on research, development, and application of cyber-physical systems. Research results and ongoing work are presented, illustrated and discussed in the following areas: enterprise collaborative networks; ontologies; Petri nets; manufacturing systems; biomedical applications; intelligent environments; control and fault tolerance; optimization and decision support; wireless technologies; energy: smart grids, renewables, management, and optimization; bio-energy; and electronics.