This comprehensive book examines a range of examples, prepared by a diverse group of academic and industry practitioners, which demonstrate how cloud-based simulation is being extensively used across many disciplines, including cyber-physical systems engineering. This book is a compendium of the state of the art in cloud-based simulation that instructors can use to inform the next generation. It highlights the underlying infrastructure, modeling paradigms, and simulation methodologies that can be brought to bear to develop the next generation of systems for a highly connected society. Such systems, aptly termed cyber-physical systems (CPS), are now widely used in e.g. transportation systems, smart grids, connected vehicles, industrial production systems, healthcare, education, and defense. Modeling and simulation (M&S), along with big data technologies, are at the forefront of complex systems engineering research. The disciplines of cloud-based simulation and CPS engineering are evolving at a rapid pace, but are not optimally supporting each other's advancement. This book brings together these two communities, which already serve multi-disciplinary applications. It provides an overview of the simulation technologies landscape, and of infrastructure pertaining to the use of cloud-based environments for CPS engineering. It covers the engineering, design, and application of cloud simulation technologies and infrastructures applicable for CPS engineering. The contributions share valuable lessons learned from developing real-time embedded and robotic systems deployed through cloud-based infrastructures for application in CPS engineering and IoT-enabled society. The coverage incorporates cloud-based M&S as a medium for facilitating CPS engineering and governance, and elaborates on available cloud-based M&S technologies and their impacts on specific aspects of CPS engineering.

The early 21st century has seen a renewed interest in research in the widely-adopted proportional-integral-differential (PID) form of control. PID Control in the Third Millennium provides an overview of the advances made as a result. Featuring: new approaches for controller tuning; control structures and configurations for more efficient control; practical issues in PID implementation; and non-standard approaches to PID including fractional-order, event-based, nonlinear, data-driven and predictive control; the nearly twenty chapters provide a state-of-the-art resume of PID controller theory, design and realization. Each chapter has specialist authorship and ideas clearly characterized from both academic and industrial viewpoints. PID Control in the Third Millennium is of interest to academics requiring a reference for the current state of PID-related research and a stimulus for further inquiry. Industrial practitioners and manufacturers of control systems with application problems relating to PID will find this to be a practical source of appropriate and advanced solutions.

Does the Information Age promise egalitarianism and democracy, or will it simply reinforce long-standing social and economic inequalities? This collection of essays analyzes the emerging role of African-Americans in post-industrial society from a variety of communications research perspectives. Accepting W.J. Wilson's theory of a socially and economically isolated African-American underclass, Barber and Tait ask the logical question: what next? "The Information Society and the Black Community "is a critical examination of the prospects and pitfalls of a historically disadvantaged group in a period of rapid technological advances and economic growth.

Adopting Frank Websters theory of the Information Society as a framework for organization and development, the book is divided into five sections that look at technological, economic, occupational, spatial, and cultural aspects of the relationship between the African-American community and the Information Society. Part One analyzes data on African-American use of information technology, and examines how the new flow of information might effect African-American social and cultural images. Part Two focuses on African-American participation in the ownership and control of information industries. Part Three treats professional training and employment patterns affecting African-Americans in the Information Age. Part Four centers around the potential uses of information technology in solving social, political, and economic problems. Part Five addresses the growing connections of the African-American community to Africa and the rest of the world via information technology.

This book presents a comprehensive development of effective numerical methods for stochastic control problems in continuous time. The process models are diffusions, jump-diffusions, or reflected diffusions of the type that occur in the majority of current applications. All the usual problem formulations are included, as well as those of more recent interest such as ergodic control, singular control and the types of reflected diffusions used as models of queuing networks. Applications to complex deterministic problems are illustrated via application to a large class of problems from the calculus of variations. The general approach is known as the Markov Chain Approximation Method. The required background to stochastic processes is surveyed, there is an extensive development of methods of approximation, and a chapter is devoted to computational techniques. The book is written on two levels, that of practice (algorithms and applications) and that of the mathematical development. Thus the methods and use should be broadly accessible. This update to the first edition will include added material on the control of the 'jump term' and the 'diffusion term.' There will be additional material on the deterministic problems, solving the Hamilton-Jacobi equations, for which the authors' methods are still among the most useful for many classes of problems. All of these topics are of great and growing current interest.

The disciplines of computer science and operations research (OR) have been linked since their origins, each contributing to the dramatic advances of the other. This work explores the connections between these key technologies: how high-performance computing methods have led to advances in OR de ployment, and how OR has contributed to the design and development of ad vanced systems. The collected writings-from researchers and practitioners in Computer Science, Operations Research, Management Science, and Artificial Intelligence-were among those delivered at the Fifth INFORMS Computer Science Technical Section Conference in Dallas, Texas, January 8-10, 1996. The articles advance both theory and practice. Presented are new approaches to complex problems based on: metaheuristics (neural networks, genetic al gorithms, and Tabu Search), optimization and mathematical programming, stochastic methods, constraint programming, and logical analysis. These ad vanced methodologies are applied to new applications in such areas as: telecom munications network design, financial engineering, manufacturing, project man agement, and forecasting, airline and machine scheduling, vehicle routing, mod eling and decision support systems. Featured is a remarkable paper by keynote speaker Fred Glover, creator of the Tabu Search family of metaheuristics. In it he develops the principles of memory-based heuristic methods, contrasts them with the popular genetic algorithms and simulated annealing, provides a sweeping survey of application vignettes, and points to promising avenues for future research."

In the last two decades fractional differential equations have been used more frequently in physics, signal processing, fluid mechanics, viscoelasticity, mathematical biology, electro chemistry and many others. It opens a new and more realistic way to capture memory dependent phenomena and irregularities inside the systems by using more sophisticated mathematical analysis.

This monograph is based on the authors work on stabilization and control design for continuous and discrete fractional order systems. The initial two chapters and some parts of the third chapter are written in tutorial fashion, presenting all the basic concepts of fractional order system and a brief overview of sliding mode control of fractional order systems. The other parts contain deal with robust finite time stability of fractional order systems, integral sliding mode control of fractional order systems, co-operative control of multi-agent systems modeled as fractional differential equation, robust stabilization of discrete fractional order systems, high performance control using soft variable structure control and contraction analysis by integer and fractional order infinitesimal variations."

Health communication research examines the role of communication in health professional/client relationships and in promoting patient adherence, the flow of information within and between health organizations, the design and effectiveness of health information for various audiences and the planning and evaluation of health care policy. Other important areas treated in this book are cultural and social factors influencing health communication, ethical issues effecting communication, and education in communication within medical schools. Medical students, physicians, policy makers, students and faculty in communications and sociology, as well as social services professionals should find this reference an important tool.

Dynamical models on graphs or random graphs are increasingly used in applied sciences as mathematical tools to study complex systems whose exact structure is too complicated to be known in detail. Besides its importance in applied sciences, the field is increasingly attracting the interest of mathematicians and theoretical physicists also because of the fundamental phenomena (synchronization, phase transitions etc.) that can be studied in the relatively simple framework of dynamical models of random graphs. This volume was developed from the Mathematical Technology of Networks conference held in Bielefeld, Germany in December 2013. The conference was designed to bring together functional analysts, mathematical physicists, and experts in dynamical systems. The contributors to this volume explore the interplay between theoretical and applied aspects of discrete and continuous graphs. Their work helps to close the gap between different avenues of research on graphs, including metric graphs and ramified structures.

Linguistic Geometry: From Search to Construction is the first book of its kind. Linguistic Geometry (LG) is an approach to the construction of mathematical models for large-scale multi-agent systems. A number of such systems, including air/space combat, robotic manufacturing, software re-engineering and Internet cyberwar, can be modeled as abstract board games. These are games with moves that can be represented by the movement of abstract pieces over locations on an abstract board. The purpose of LG is to provide strategies to guide the games' participants to their goals. Traditionally, discovering such strategies required searches in giant game trees. These searches are often beyond the capacity of modern and even conceivable future computers. LG dramatically reduces the size of the search trees, making the problems computationally tractable. LG provides a formalization and abstraction of search heuristics used by advanced experts including chess grandmasters. Essentially, these heuristics replace search with the construction of strategies. To formalize the heuristics, LG employs the theory of formal languages (i.e. formal linguistics), as well as certain geometric structures over an abstract board. The new formal strategies solve problems from different domains far beyond the areas envisioned by the experts. For a number of these domains, Linguistic Geometry yields optimal solutions.

This book presents a concise study of controllability theory of partial differential equations when they are equipped with actuators and/or sensors that are finite dimensional at every moment of time. Based on the author's extensive research in the area of controllability theory, this monograph specifically focuses on the issues of controllability, observability, and stabilizability for parabolic and hyperbolic partial differential equations. The topics in this book also cover related applied questions such as the problem of localization of unknown pollution sources based on information obtained from point sensors that arise in environmental monitoring. Researchers and graduate students interested in controllability theory of partial differential equations and its applications will find this book to be an invaluable resource to their studies.

One service mathematics has rendered the 'Bt mm, ... si j'avait su comment en revenir, human race. It has put common sense back je n'y serais point alIe.' Jules Verne where it belongs. on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labelled 'discarded non The series is divergent; therefore we may be sense'. Eric T. Bell able to do something with it. O. Heavisidc Mathematics is a tool for thought. A highly necessary tool in a world where both feedback and non linearities abound. Similarly, all kinds of parts of mathematics serve as tools for other parts and for other sciences. Applying a simple rewriting rule to the quote on the right above one finds such statements as: 'One service topology has rendered mathematical physics .. .'; 'One service logic has rendered com puter science .. .'; 'One service category theory has rendered mathematics .. .'. All arguably true. And all statements obtainable this way form part of the raison d'etre of this series."

This application-oriented monograph focuses on a novel and complex type of control systems. Written on an engineering level, including fundamentals, advanced methods and applications, the book applies techniques originating from new methods such as artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, neural networks etc.

Markov decision process (MDP) models are widely used for modeling sequential decision-making problems that arise in engineering, economics, computer science, and the social sciences. Many real-world problems modeled by MDPs have huge state and/or action spaces, giving an opening to the curse of dimensionality and so making practical solution of the resulting models intractable. In other cases, the system of interest is too complex to allow explicit specification of some of the MDP model parameters, but simulation samples are readily available (e.g., for random transitions and costs). For these settings, various sampling and population-based algorithms have been developed to overcome the difficulties of computing an optimal solution in terms of a policy and/or value function. Specific approaches include adaptive sampling, evolutionary policy iteration, evolutionary random policy search, and model reference adaptive search.
This substantially enlarged new edition reflects the latest developments in novel algorithms and their underpinning theories, and presents an updated account of the topics that have emerged since the publication of the first edition. Includes:
innovative material on MDPs, both in constrained settings and with uncertain transition properties;
game-theoretic method for solving MDPs;
theories for developing roll-out based algorithms; and
details of approximation stochastic annealing, a population-based on-line simulation-based algorithm.
The self-contained approach of this book will appeal not only to researchers in MDPs, stochastic modeling, and control, and simulation but will be a valuable source of tuition and reference for students of control and operations research.

Basic Concepts in Information Theory and Coding is an outgrowth of a one semester introductory course that has been taught at the University of Southern California since the mid-1960s. Lecture notes from that course have evolved in response to student reaction, new technological and theoretical develop ments, and the insights of faculty members who have taught the course (in cluding the three of us). In presenting this material, we have made it accessible to a broad audience by limiting prerequisites to basic calculus and the ele mentary concepts of discrete probability theory. To keep the material suitable for a one-semester course, we have limited its scope to discrete information theory and a general discussion of coding theory without detailed treatment of algorithms for encoding and decoding for various specific code classes. Readers will find that this book offers an unusually thorough treatment of noiseless self-synchronizing codes, as well as the advantage of problem sections that have been honed by reactions and interactions of several gen erations of bright students, while Agent 00111 provides a context for the discussion of abstract concepts."

The DARPA Grand Challenge was a landmark in the field of robotics: a race by autonomous vehicles through 132 miles of rough Nevada terrain. It showcased exciting and unprecedented capabilities in robotic perception, navigation, and control. The event took place in October 2005 and drew teams of competitors from academia and industry, as well as many garage hobbyists. This book presents fifteen technical papers that describe each team's driverless vehicle, race strategy, and insights. As a whole, they present the state of the art in autonomous vehicle technology and offer a glimpse of future technology for tomorrow 's driverless cars.

Focuses on System Identification applications of the adaptive methods presented. but which can also be applied to other applications of adaptive nonlinear processes.

Covers recent research results in the area of adaptive nonlinear system identification from the authors and other researchers in the field.

Optical networks epitomize complex communication systems, and they comprise the Internet s infrastructural backbone. The first of its kind, this book develops the mathematical framework needed from a control perspective to tackle various game-theoretical problems in optical networks. In doing so, it aims to help design control algorithms that optimally allocate the resources of these networks. With its fresh problem-solving approach, Game Theory in Optical Networks is a unique resource for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students in applied mathematics and systems/control engineering, as well as those in electrical and computer engineering."

Shortly after the end of World War II high-speed digital computing machines were being developed. It was clear that the mathematical aspects of com putation needed to be reexamined in order to make efficient use of high-speed digital computers for mathematical computations. Accordingly, under the leadership of Min a Rees, John Curtiss, and others, an Institute for Numerical Analysis was set up at the University of California at Los Angeles under the sponsorship of the National Bureau of Standards. A similar institute was formed at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D. C. In 1949 J. Barkeley Rosser became Director of the group at UCLA for a period of two years. During this period we organized a seminar on the study of solu tions of simultaneous linear equations and on the determination of eigen values. G. Forsythe, W. Karush, C. Lanczos, T. Motzkin, L. J. Paige, and others attended this seminar. We discovered, for example, that even Gaus sian elimination was not well understood from a machine point of view and that no effective machine oriented elimination algorithm had been developed. During this period Lanczos developed his three-term relationship and I had the good fortune of suggesting the method of conjugate gradients. We dis covered afterward that the basic ideas underlying the two procedures are essentially the same. The concept of conjugacy was not new to me. In a joint paper with G. D."

This is the first book focusing on bifurcation dynamics in 1-dimensional polynomial nonlinear discrete systems. It comprehensively discusses the general mathematical conditions of bifurcations in polynomial nonlinear discrete systems, as well as appearing and switching bifurcations for simple and higher-order singularity period-1 fixed-points in the 1-dimensional polynomial discrete systems. Further, it analyzes the bifurcation trees of period-1 to chaos generated by period-doubling, and monotonic saddle-node bifurcations. Lastly, the book presents methods for period-2 and period-doubling renormalization for polynomial discrete systems, and describes the appearing mechanism and period-doublization of period-n fixed-points on bifurcation trees for the first time, offering readers fascinating insights into recent research results in nonlinear discrete systems.

Feedback Control Systems: A Fast Track Guide for Scientists and Engineers is an essential reference tool for: Electrical, mechanical and aerospace engineers who are developing or improving products, with a need to use feedback control systems. Faculty and graduate students in the fields of engineering and experimental science (e.g., physics) who are building their own high-performance measuring/test arrangements. Faculties teaching laboratory courses in engineering and measurement techniques, and the students taking those courses. Practising engineers, scientists, and students who need a quick intuitive education in the issues related to feedback control systems. Key features of Feedback Control Systems: The contents and the layout of the book are structured to ensure satisfactory proficiency for the novice designer. The authors provide the reader with a simple yet powerful method for designing control systems using several sensors or actuators. It offers a comprehensive control system troubleshooting and performance testing guide. From the reviewers: Control systems are ubiquitous and their use would be even more widespread if more people were competent in designing them. This book will play a valuable role in expanding the cadre of competent designers. This is a book that needed to be written, and its presentation is different from any other book on controls intended for a wide community of engineers and scientists. The book breaks the common clichA(c) of style in the control literature that tends toward mathematical formality. Instead, the emphasis is on intuition and practical advice. The book contains a very valuable and novel heuristic treatment of the subject. .. one of the bestexamples of a book that describes the design cycle. The book will help satisfy the demand among practising engineers for a good introduction to control systems.

With the advent and increasing popularity of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and e-learning technologies, the need of "automatic assessment "and" "of" teacher/tutor support" for the two tightly intertwined activities of "comprehension" of reading materials and of "collaboration" among peers has grown significantly. In this context, a polyphonic model of discourse derived from Bakhtin s work as a paradigm is used for analyzing both general texts and CSCL conversations in a unique framework focused on different facets of textual cohesion.

As specificity of our analysis, the "individual learning" perspective is focused on the identification of reading strategies and on providing a multi-dimensional textual complexity model, whereas the "collaborative learning" dimension is centered on the evaluation of participants involvement, as well as on collaboration assessment.

Our approach based on advanced Natural Language Processing techniques provides a qualitative estimation of the learning process and enhances understanding as a mediator of learning by providing automated feedback to both learners and teachers or tutors. The main benefits are its flexibility, extensibility and nevertheless specificity for covering multiple stages, starting from reading classroom materials, to discussing on specific topics in a collaborative manner and finishing the feedback loop by verbalizing metacognitive thoughts."

In the study of the computational structure of biological/robotic sensorimotor systems, distributed models have gained center stage in recent years, with a range of issues including self-organization, non-linear dynamics, field computing etc. This multidisciplinary research area is addressed here by a multidisciplinary team of contributors, who provide a balanced set of articulated presentations which include reviews, computational models, simulation studies, psychophysical, and neurophysiological experiments.

The book is divided into three parts, each characterized by a slightly different focus: in part I, the major theme concerns computational maps which typically model cortical areas, according to a view of the sensorimotor cortex as "geometric engine" and the site of "internal models" of external spaces. Part II also addresses problems of self-organization and field computing, but in a simpler computational architecture which, although lacking a specialized cortical machinery, can still behave in a very adaptive and surprising way by exploiting the interaction with the real world. Finally part III is focused on the motor control issues related to the physical properties of muscular actuators and the dynamic interactions with the world.

The reader will find different approaches on controversial issues, such as the role and nature of force fields, the need for internal representations, the nature of invariant commands, the vexing question about coordinate transformations, the distinction between hierachiacal and bi-directional modelling, and the influence of muscle stiffness.

The lectures contained in this book were presented at Harvard University in June 1979. The workshop at which they were presented was the third such on algebro-geometric methods. The first was held in 1973 in London and the emphasis was largely on geometric methods. The second was held at Ames Research Center-NASA in 1976. There again the emphasis was on geometric methods, but algebraic geometry was becoming a dominant theme. In the two years after the Ames meeting there was tremendous growth in the applications of algebraic geometry to systems theory and it was becoming clear that much of the algebraic systems theory was very closely related to the geometric systems theory. On this basis we felt that this was the right time to devote a workshop to the applications of algebra and algebraic geometry to linear systems theory. The lectures contained in this volume represent all but one of the tutorial lectures presented at the workshop. The lec ture of Professor Murray Wonham is not contained in this volume and we refer the interested to the archival literature. This workshop was jointly sponsored by a grant from Ames Research Center-NASA and a grant from the Advanced Study Institute Program of NATO. We greatly appreciate the financial support rendered by these two organizations. The American Mathematical Society hosted this meeting as part of their Summer Seminars in Applied Mathematics and will publish the companion volume of con tributed papers."

This monograph explores a dual variational formulation of solutions to nonlinear diffusion equations with general nonlinearities as null minimizers of appropriate energy functionals. The author demonstrates how this method can be utilized as a convenient tool for proving the existence of these solutions when others may fail, such as in cases of evolution equations with nonautonomous operators, with low regular data, or with singular diffusion coefficients. By reducing it to a minimization problem, the original problem is transformed into an optimal control problem with a linear state equation. This procedure simplifies the proof of the existence of minimizers and, in particular, the determination of the first-order conditions of optimality. The dual variational formulation is illustrated in the text with specific diffusion equations that have general nonlinearities provided by potentials having various stronger or weaker properties. These equations can represent mathematical models to various real-world physical processes. Inverse problems and optimal control problems are also considered, as this technique is useful in their treatment as well.