The first part is devoted to the topic of quantum gravity and string theories, mainly concerned with recent authoritative results in the study of discretizations in classical and quantum general relativity, non-commutative theories of gravity, (2+1)-dimensional supergravity, and Berezin description of Kaehler quotients. The field to particle transition problem is also considered.

The second part deals with cosmology and black holes. Here, cosmological, inflationary, and braneworld scenarios are investigated. Moreover, some scalar field models for the dark matter content of the universe as well as new models of protostellar collapse and fragmentation are presented. This part includes also a study of de Sitter/Anti-de Sitter phase transition for black holes, an understanding of hairy black holes and an improvement of the no-hair theorem proof for the Proca field.

The third part is devoted to exact solutions, in particular classical and quantum cosmological solutions in scalar-tensor theories. Additionally, a discussion about conformally flat axisymmetric spacetimes and some considerations on accelerated expansion in scalar-tensor theories are presented.
Experimental and some mixed topics are included in the final part. Among them is an experimental foundation of nonlocality and superluminal signal velocity in photonic tunneling, a proposal for testing the weak equivalence principle for charged particles in space. Moreover, a possible new type of skewon field linked to Maxwell theory is also presented, and an authoritative discussion at the interface of quantum and gravitational realms.

This book presents contributions on the most active lines of recent advanced research in the field of nonlinear mechanics and physics selected from the 4th International Conference on Structural Nonlinear Dynamics and Diagnosis. It includes fifteen chapters by outstanding scientists, covering various aspects of applications, including road tanker dynamics and stability, simulation of abrasive wear, energy harvesting, modeling and analysis of flexoelectric nanoactuator, periodic Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problems, nonlinear stability in Hamiltonian systems, nonlinear dynamics of rotating composites, nonlinear vibrations of a shallow arch, extreme pulse dynamics in mode-locked lasers, localized structures in a photonic crystal fiber resonator, nonlinear stochastic dynamics, linearization of nonlinear resonances, treatment of a linear delay differential equation, and fractional nonlinear damping. It appeals to a wide range of experts in the field of structural nonlinear dynamics and offers researchers and engineers an introduction to the challenges posed by nonlinearities in the development of these topics

This book details a systematic characteristics-based finite element procedure to investigate incompressible, free-surface and compressible flows. Several sections derive the Fluid Dynamics equations from first thermo-mechanics principles and develop this multi-dimensional and infinite-directional upstream procedure by combining a finite element discretization with an implicit non-linearly stable Runge-Kutta time integration for the numerical solution of the Euler and Navier Stokes equations.

The growing commercial market of Microwave/ Millimeter wave industry over the past decade has led to the explosion of interests and opportunities for the design and development of microwave components.The design of most microwave components requires the use of commercially available electromagnetic (EM) simulation tools for their analysis. In the design process, the simulations are carried out by varying the design parameters until the desired response is obtained. The optimization of design parameters by manual searching is a cumbersome and time consuming process. Soft computing methods such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Fuzzy Logic (FL) have been widely used by EM researchers for microwave design since last decade. The aim of these methods is to tolerate imprecision, uncertainty, and approximation to achieve robust and low cost solution in a small time frame. Modeling and optimization are essential parts and powerful tools for the microwave/millimeter wave design. This book deals with the development and use of soft computing methods for tackling challenging design problems in the microwave/millimeter wave domain. The aim in the development of these methods is to obtain the design in small time frame while improving the accuracy of the design for a wide range of applications. To achieve this goal, a few diverse design problems of microwave field, representing varied challenges in the design, such as different microstrip antennas, microwave filters, a microstrip-via and also some critical high power components such as nonlinear tapers and RF-windows are considered as case-study design problems. Different design methodologies are developed for these applications. The presents soft computing methods, their review for microwave/millimeter wave design problems and specific case-study problems to infuse better insight and understanding of the subject.

This reference spells out the fundamentals of Augmented with 1024 equations, 138 references and 82 figures and 69 problems, this book provides an introduction to and overview of signal detection and estimation. detection and estimation theory, reviews mathemat ical techniques and gives the essential background needed to understand the more advanced material, provides detailed examples stated and solved showing all the necessary steps, and contains chapter-end problems and provides step-by-step solutions that facilitate self-study. Each chapter provides an introduction, summary, problems and list of references and expands upon material covered in the previous chapter.

This volume is dedicated to Jacob Aboudi, a ?ne scientist who has made seminal c- tributions in applied mechanics. The papers presented here re?ect the appreciation of many of Jacob's colleagues. A publication list f- lowing this introduction provides an indi- tion of his distinguished academic career, c- rently in its ?fth decade, and the breadth of hisknowledge. His papersconsistentlydem- strate originality, innovation and diligence. This list uncovers the methodical work of a dedicated researcher whose achievements established him as a leading authority in the area of mathematical modeling of the beh- ior of heterogeneous materials, the area which became known as homogenization theory. Starting in 1981, Jacob established a micromechanical model known as the Method of Cells (MOC) which evolved into the Generalized Method of Cells (GMC) that predicts the macroscopic response of composite materials as a function of the pr- erties, volume fractions, shapes, and constitutive behavior of its constituents. The versatility of the model has been demonstrated to effectively incorporate various types of constituent material behavior (i. e. , both coupled and uncoupled mecha- cal, thermal, electrical and magnetic effects). As a result of its potential in providing an ef?cient tool for the emerging ?eld of multiscale analysis, the method gained increasing attention and became a subject for further research.

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.

During the past decade, geneticists have cloned scores of Mendelian disease genes and constructed a rough draft of the entire human genome. The unprecedented insights into human disease and evolution offered by mapping, cloning, and sequencing will transform medicine and agriculture. This revolution depends vitally on the contributions of applied mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. Mathematical and Statistical Methods for Genetic Analysis is written to equip students in the mathematical sciences to understand and model the epidemiological and experimental data encountered in genetics research. Mathematical, statistical, and computational principles relevant to this task are developed hand in hand with applications to population genetics, gene mapping, risk prediction, testing of epidemiological hypotheses, molecular evolution, and DNA sequence analysis. Many specialized topics are covered that are currently accessible only in journal articles. This second edition expands the original edition by over 100 pages and includes new material on DNA sequence analysis, diffusion processes, binding domain identification, Bayesian estimation of haplotype frequencies, case-control association studies, the gamete competition model, QTL mapping and factor analysis, the Lander-Green-Kruglyak algorithm of pedigree analysis, and codon and rate variation models in molecular phylogeny. Sprinkled throughout the chapters are many new problems. Kenneth Lange is Professor of Biomathematics and Human Genetics at the UCLA School of Medicine. At various times during his career, he has held appointments at the University of New Hampshire, MIT, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. While at the University of Michigan, he was the Pharmacia & Upjohn Foundation Professor of Biostatistics. His research interests include human genetics, population modeling, biomedical imaging, computational statistics, and applied stochastic processes. Springer-Verlag published his book Numerical Analysis for Statisticians in 1999.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 2000 Howard conference on "Infinite Dimensional Lie Groups in Geometry and Representation Theory." It presents some important recent developments in this area. It opens with a topological characterization of regular groups, treats among other topics the integrability problem of various infinite dimensional Lie algebras, presents substantial contributions to important subjects in modern geometry, and concludes with interesting applications to representation theory. The book should be a new source of inspiration for advanced graduate students and established researchers in the field of geometry and its applications to mathematical physics.

New approaches are needed that could move us towards developing effective systems for problem solving and decision making, systems that can deal with complex and ill-structured situations, systems that can function in information rich environments, systems that can cope with imprecise information, systems that can rely on their knowledge and learn from experience - i.e. intelligent systems. One of the main efforts in intelligent systems development is focused on knowledge and information management which is regarded as the crucial issue in smart decision making support. The 13 Chapters of this book represent a sample of such effort. The overall aim of this book is to provide guidelines to develop tools for smart processing of knowledge and information. Still, the guide does not presume to give ultimate answers. Rather, it poses ideas and case studies to explore and the complexities and challenges of modern knowledge management issues. It also encourages its reader to become aware of the multifaceted interdisciplinary character of such issues. The premise of this book is that its reader will leave it with a heightened ability to think - in different ways - about developing, evaluating, and supporting intelligent knowledge and information management systems in real life based environment.

The aim of this book is to present the theory and applications of the relativistic Boltzmann equation in a self-contained manner, even for those readers who have no familiarity with special and general relativity. Though an attempt is made to present the basic concepts in a complete fashion, the style of presentation is chosen to be appealing to readers who want to understand how kinetic theory is used for explicit calculations. The book will be helpful not only as a textbook for an advanced course on relativistic kinetic theory but also as a reference for physicists, astrophysicists and applied mathematicians who are interested in the theory and applications of the relativistic Boltzmann equation.

Applied Time Series Analysis and Innovative Computing contains the applied time series analysis and innovative computing paradigms, with frontier application studies for the time series problems based on the recent works at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford, the University of Hong Kong, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The monograph was drafted when the author was a post-doctoral fellow in Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. It provides a systematic introduction to the use of innovative computing paradigms as an investigative tool for applications in time series analysis. Applied Time Series Analysis and Innovative Computing offers the state of art of tremendous advances in applied time series analysis and innovative computing paradigms and also serves as an excellent reference work for researchers and graduate students working on applied time series analysis and innovative computing paradigms.

The Handbook of Mathematical Fluid Dynamics is a compendium of essays that provides a survey of the major topics in the subject. Each article traces developments, surveys the results of the past decade, discusses the current state of knowledge and presents major future directions and open problems. Extensive bibliographic material is provided. The book is intended to be useful both to experts in the field and to mathematicians and other scientists who wish to learn about or begin research in mathematical fluid dynamics. The Handbook illuminates an exciting subject that involves rigorous mathematical theory applied to an important physical problem, namely the motion of fluids.

This book discusses recent developments and contemporary research in mathematics, statistics and their applications in computing. All contributing authors are eminent academicians, scientists, researchers and scholars in their respective fields, hailing from around the world. The conference has emerged as a powerful forum, offering researchers a venue to discuss, interact and collaborate and stimulating the advancement of mathematics and its applications in computer science. The book will allow aspiring researchers to update their knowledge of cryptography, algebra, frame theory, optimizations, stochastic processes, compressive sensing, functional analysis, complex variables, etc. Educating future consumers, users, producers, developers and researchers in mathematics and computing is a challenging task and essential to the development of modern society. Hence, mathematics and its applications in computer science are of vital importance to a broad range of communities, including mathematicians and computing professionals across different educational levels and disciplines.

This thorough yet understandable introduction to the boundary element method presents an attractive alternative to the finite element method. It not only explains the theory but also presents the implementation of the theory into computer code, the code in FORTRAN 95 can be freely downloaded. The book also addresses the issue of efficiently using parallel processing hardware in order to considerably speed up the computations for large systems. The applications range from problems of heat and fluid flow to static and dynamic elasto-plastic problems in continuum mechanics.

This book opens the door to multiobjective optimization for students in fields such as engineering, management, economics and applied mathematics. It offers a comprehensive introduction to multiobjective optimization, with a primary emphasis on multiobjective linear programming and multiobjective integer/mixed integer programming. A didactic book, it is mainly intended for undergraduate and graduate students, but can also be useful for researchers and practitioners. Further, it is accompanied by an interactive software package - developed by the authors for Windows platforms - which can be used for teaching and decision-making support purposes in multiobjective linear programming problems. Thus, besides the textbook's coverage of the essential concepts, theory and methods, complemented with illustrative examples and exercises, the computational tool enables students to experiment and enhance their technical skills, as well as to capture the essential characteristics of real-world problems.

During the past decade model predictive control (MPC), also referred to as receding horizon control or moving horizon control, has become the preferred control strategy for quite a number of industrial processes. There have been many significant advances in this area over the past years, one of the most important ones being its extension to nonlinear systems. This book gives an up-to-date assessment of the current state of the art in the new field of nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC). The main topic areas that appear to be of central importance for NMPC are covered, namely receding horizon control theory, modeling for NMPC, computational aspects of on-line optimization and application issues. The book consists of selected papers presented at the International Symposium on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control - Assessment and Future Directions, which took place from June 3 to 5, 1998, in Ascona, Switzerland.
The book is geared towards researchers and practitioners in the area of control engineering and control theory. It is also suited for postgraduate students as the book contains several overview articles that give a tutorial introduction into the various aspects of nonlinear model predictive control, including systems theory, computations, modeling and applications.

Evolutionary computing paradigms offer robust and powerful adaptive search mechanisms for system design. This book's thirteen chapters cover a wide area of topics in evolutionary computing and applications, including an introduction to evolutionary computing in system design; evolutionary neuro-fuzzy systems; and evolution of fuzzy controllers. The book will be useful to researchers in intelligent systems with interest in evolutionary computing, as well as application engineers and system designers.

This book gathers selected contributions by top Portuguese and international researchers in the field of Operations Research, presented at the 19th Congress of APDIO (Portuguese Association of Operational Research). The papers address a broad range of complex real-world problems, which are approached using recent theoretical techniques. Of particular interest are the applications of e.g. linear, nonlinear and mixed-integer programming, multiobjective optimization, metaheuristics and hybrid heuristics, multicriteria decision analysis, data envelopment analysis, clustering techniques and decision support systems, in such varied contexts as: supply chain management, scheduling problems, production management, logistics, energy, finance and healthcare. This conference, organized by APDIO and held in Aveiro, Portugal in September 2018, offered an ideal opportunity to discuss the latest developments in this field and to build new bridges between academic researchers and practitioners. Summarizing the outcomes, this book offers a valuable tool for all researchers, students and practitioners who wish to learn about the latest trends in this field.

This volume contains the invited contributions from talks delivered in the Fall 2011 series of the Seminar on Mathematical Sciences and Applications 2011 at Virginia State University. Contributors to this volume, who are leading researchers in their fields, present their work in a way to generate genuine interdisciplinary interaction. Thus all articles therein are selective, self-contained, and are pedagogically exposed and help to foster student interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and to stimulate graduate and undergraduate research and collaboration between researchers in different areas.

This work is suitable for both students and researchers in a variety of interdisciplinary fields namely, mathematics as it applies to engineering, physical-chemistry, nanotechnology, life sciences, computer science, finance, economics, and game theory. "

This book offers a first course in analysis for scientists and engineers. It can be used at the advanced undergraduate level or as part of the curriculum in a graduate program. The book is built around metric spaces. In the first three chapters, the authors lay the foundational material and cover the all-important "four-C's": convergence, completeness, compactness, and continuity. In subsequent chapters, the basic tools of analysis are used to give brief introductions to differential and integral equations, convex analysis, and measure theory. The treatment is modern and aesthetically pleasing. It lays the groundwork for the needs of classical fields as well as the important new fields of optimization and probability theory.

The topic of level sets is currently very timely and useful for creating realistic 3-D images and animations. They are powerful numerical techniques for analyzing and computing interface motion in a host of application settings. In computer vision, it has been applied to stereo and segmentation, whereas in graphics it has been applied to the postproduction process of in-painting and 3-D model construction. Osher is co-inventor of the Level Set Methods, a pioneering framework introduced jointly with James Sethian from the University of Berkeley in 1998. This methodology has been used up to now to provide solutions to a wide application range not limited to image processing, computer vision, robotics, fluid mechanics, crystallography, lithography, and computer graphics. The topic is of great interest to advanced students, professors, and R&D professionals working in the areas of graphics (post-production), video-based surveillance, visual inspection, augmented reality, document image processing, and medical image processing. These techniques are already employed to provide solutions and products in the industry (Cognitech, Siemens, Philips, Focus Imaging). An essential compilation of survey chapters from the leading researchers in the field, emphasizing the applications of the methods. This book can be suitable for a short professional course related with the processing of visual information.

This is an up to date exposition of nonlinear phenomena in random and inhomogeneous media which provides recent results on the combined effects of nonlinearity and inhomogeneity, including random inhomogeneity. Topics covered include recent developments within such popular areas as nonlinear photonic crystals, inhomogeneous optical fibres (dispersion management), discrete nonlinear lattices, discrete breathers, Bose-Einstein condensates, ultra-short optical pulse, Josephson lattices, various types of inhomogeneous waveguides and nonlinear quantization.

This invaluable book has been written for engineers and engineering scientists in a style that is readable, precise, concise, and practical. It gives first priority to the formulation of problems, presenting the classical results as the gold standard, and the numerical approach as a tool for obtaining solutions. The classical part is a revision of the well-known text Foundations of Solid Mechanics, with a much-expanded discussion on the theories of plasticity and large elastic deformation with finite strains. The computational part is all new and is aimed at solving many major linear and nonlinear boundary-value problems.