Optimization techniques have developed into a modern-day solution for real-world problems in various industries. As a way to improve performance and handle issues of uncertainty, optimization research becomes a topic of special interest across disciplines. Problem Solving and Uncertainty Modeling through Optimization and Soft Computing Applications presents the latest research trends and developments in the area of applied optimization methodologies and soft computing techniques for solving complex problems. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, this critical publication is an essential reference source for engineers, managers, researchers, and post-graduate students.

Through analysis of three case study videogames - Left 4 Dead 2, DayZ and Minecraft - and their online player communities, Digital Zombies, Undead Stories develops a framework for understanding how collective gameplay generates experiences of narrative, as well as the narrative dimensions of players' creative activity on social media platforms. Narrative emergence is addressed as a powerful form of player experience in multiplayer games, one which makes individual games' boundaries and meanings fluid and negotiable by players. The phenomenon is also shown to be recursive in nature, shaping individual and collective understandings of videogame texts over time. Digital Zombies, Undead Stories focuses on games featuring zombies as central antagonists. The recurrent figure of the videogame zombie, which mediates between chaos and rule-driven predictability, serves as both metaphor and mascot for narrative emergence. This book argues that in the zombie genre, emergent experiences are at the heart of narrative experiences for players, and more broadly demonstrates the potential for the phenomenon to be understood as a fundamental part of everyday play experiences across genres.

Combinatorial optimization is a multidisciplinary scientific area, lying in the interface of three major scientific domains: mathematics, theoretical computer science and management. The three volumes of the Combinatorial Optimization series aim to cover a wide range of topics in this area. These topics also deal with fundamental notions and approaches as with several classical applications of combinatorial optimization. Concepts of Combinatorial Optimization, is divided into three parts: - On the complexity of combinatorial optimization problems, presenting basics about worst-case and randomized complexity; - Classical solution methods, presenting the two most-known methods for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems, that are Branch-and-Bound and Dynamic Programming; - Elements from mathematical programming, presenting fundamentals from mathematical programming based methods that are in the heart of Operations Research since the origins of this field.

This book presents the state-of-the-art methods in Linear Integer Programming, including some new algorithms and heuristic methods developed by the authors in recent years. Topics as Characteristic equation (CE), application of CE to bi-objective and multi-objective problems, Binary integer problems, Mixed-integer models, Knapsack models, Complexity reduction, Feasible-space reduction, Random search, Connected graph are also treated.

The advent of the internet largely changed the landscape of marketing to adopt a wide variety of communication techniques and creative selling on virtual platforms. Gaming provides a highly pervasive and influential mode of offering new media communication to consumers that can be further improved by digital innovation. Application of Gaming in New Media Marketing is a collection of vital research on the methods and applications of gaming in marketing, including its growth, recent trends, practices, issues, and main challenges. Highlighting a range of topics including digital advertising, media planning, and social media marketing, this book is ideally designed for marketers, software developers, managers, business researchers, academicians, and graduate-level students seeking current research on new and innovative methods to reach and connect with audiences through games in a highly interactive, measurable, and focused way.

Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It s the art of anticipating your opponent s next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world. Using a diverse array of rich case studies from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history the authors show how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it. Mastering game theory will make you more successful in business and life, and this lively book is the key to that mastery."

The book systematically introduces smart power system design and its infrastructure, platform and operating standards. It focuses on multi-objective optimization and illustrates where the intelligence of the system lies. With abundant project data, this book is a practical guideline for engineers and researchers in electrical engineering, as well as power network designers and managers in administration.

This is a guide, in theory and in practice, to how current technological changes have impacted our interaction with texts and with each other. Henry Sussman rereads pivotal moments in literary, philosophical and cultural modernity as anticipating the cybernetic discourse that has increasingly defined theory since the computer revolution. Cognitive science, psychoanalysis and systems theory are paralleled to current trends in literary and philosophical theory. Chapters alternate between theory and readings of literary texts, resulting in a broad but rigorously grounded framework for the relation between literature and computer science. This book is a refreshing perspective on the analog-orientated tradition of theory in the humanities - and offers the first literary-textual genealogy of the digital.

This bookdescribes computational financetools. It covers fundamental numerical analysis and computational techniques, such asoption pricing, and givesspecial attention tosimulation and optimization. Many chapters are organized as case studies aroundportfolio insurance and risk estimation problems. In particular, several chapters explain optimization heuristics and how to use them for portfolio selection and in calibration of estimation and option pricing models. Such practical examples allow readers to learn the steps for solving specific problems and apply these steps to others. At the same time, the applications are relevant enough to make the book a useful reference. Matlab and R sample code is provided in the text and can be downloaded from the book's website.
Shows ways to build and implement tools that help test ideasFocuses on the application of heuristics; standard methods receive limited attentionPresents as separate chapters problems from portfolio optimization, estimation of econometric models, and calibration of option pricing models"

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and optimal shape design (OSD) are of practical importance for many engineering applications - the aeronautic, automobile, and nuclear industries are all major users of these technologies.
Giving the state of the art in shape optimization for an extended range of applications, this new edition explains the equations needed to understand OSD problems for fluids (Euler and Navier Strokes, but also those for microfluids) and covers numerical simulation techniques. Automatic differentiation, approximate gradients, unstructured mesh adaptation, multi-model configurations, and time-dependent problems are introduced, illustrating how these techniques are implemented within the industrial environments of the aerospace and automobile industries.
With the dramatic increase in computing power since the first edition, methods that were previously unfeasible have begun giving results. The book remains primarily one on differential shape optimization, but the coverage of evolutionary algorithms, topological optimization methods, and level set algortihms has been expanded so that each of these methods is now treated in a separate chapter.
Presenting a global view of the field with simple mathematical explanations, coding tips and tricks, analytical and numerical tests, and exhaustive referencing, the book will be essential reading for engineers interested in the implementation and solution of optimization problems. Whether using commercial packages or in-house solvers, or a graduate or researcher in aerospace or mechanical engineering, fluid dynamics, or CFD, the second edition will help the reader understand and solve design problems in this exciting area of research and development, and will prove especially useful in showing how to apply the methodology to practical problems.

This book provides an overview of radar waveform synthesis obtained as the result of computational optimization processes and covers the most challenging application fields. The book balances a practical point of view with a rigorous mathematical approach corroborated with a wealth of numerical study cases and some real experiments. Additionally, the book has a cross-disciplinary approach because it exploits cross-fertilization with the recent research and discoveries in optimization theory. The material of the book is organized into ten chapters, each one completed with a comprehensive list of references. The following topics are covered: recent advances of binary sequence designs and their applications; quadratic optimization for unimodular sequence synthesis and applications; a computational design of phase-only (possibly binary) sequences for radar systems; constrained radar code design for spectrally congested environments via quadratic optimization; robust transmit code and receive filter design for extended targets detection in clutter; optimizing radar transceiver for Doppler processing via non-convex programming; radar waveform design via the majorization-minimization framework; Lagrange programming neural network for radar waveform design; cognitive local ambiguity function shaping with spectral coexistence and experiments; and relative entropy based waveform design for MIMO radar. Targeted at an audience of radar engineers and researchers, this book provides thorough and up-to-date coverage of optimisation theory for radar waveform design.

Congruences are ubiquitous in computer science, engineering, mathematics, and related areas. Developing techniques for finding (the number of) solutions of congruences is an important problem. But there are many scenarios in which we are interested in only a subset of the solutions; in other words, there are some restrictions. What do we know about these restricted congruences, their solutions, and applications? This book introduces the tools that are needed when working on restricted congruences and then systematically studies a variety of restricted congruences. Restricted Congruences in Computing defines several types of restricted congruence, obtains explicit formulae for the number of their solutions using a wide range of tools and techniques, and discusses their applications in cryptography, information security, information theory, coding theory, string theory, quantum field theory, parallel computing, artificial intelligence, computational biology, discrete mathematics, number theory, and more. This is the first book devoted to restricted congruences and their applications. It will be of interest to graduate students and researchers across computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics.

This book is devoted to game theory and its applications to environmental problems, economics, and management. It collects contributions originating from the 12th International Conference on "Game Theory and Management" 2018 (GTM2018) held at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia, from 27 to 29 June 2018.

This publication contributes to the serious games field by investigating original contributions and methods that use serious games in various domains. This comprehensive and timely publication works as an essential reference source, building on the available literature in the field of Serious Games for the economic and social development of countries while providing for further research opportunities in this dynamic and growing field. Thus, the book provides the opportunity for a reflection on this important issue, increasing the understanding of the importance of Serious Games in the context of organizations' improvements, providing relevant academic work, empirical research findings, and an overview of this relevant field of study. This text provides the resources necessary for policy makers, technology developers and managers to adopt and implement solutions for a more digital era.

The engineering and business problems the world faces today have become more impenetrable and unstructured, making the design of a satisfactory problem-specific algorithm nontrivial. Modeling, Analysis, and Applications in Metaheuristic Computing: Advancements and Trends is a collection of the latest developments, models, and applications within the transdisciplinary fields related to metaheuristic computing. Providing researchers, practitioners, and academicians with insight into a wide range of topics such as genetic algorithms, differential evolution, and ant colony optimization, this book compiles the latest findings, analysis, improvements, and applications of technologies within metaheuristic computing.

One of the most frequently occurring types of optimization problems involves decision variables which have to take integer values. From a practical point of view, such problems occur in countless areas of management, engineering, administration, etc., and include such problems as location of plants or warehouses, scheduling of aircraft, cutting raw materials to prescribed dimensions, design of computer chips, increasing reliability or capacity of networks, etc. This is the class of problems known in the professional literature as "discrete optimization" problems. While these problems are of enormous applicability, they present many challenges from a computational point of view. This volume is an update on the impressive progress achieved by mathematicians, operations researchers, and computer scientists in solving discrete optimization problems of very large sizes. The surveys in this volume present a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in discrete optimization and are written by the most prominent researchers from all over the world.

This volume describes the tremendous progress in discrete optimization achieved in the last 20 years since the publication of Discrete Optimization '77, Annals of Discrete Mathematics, volumes 4 and 5, 1979 (Elsevier). It contains surveys of the state of the art written by the most prominent researchers in the field from all over the world, and covers topics like neighborhood search techniques, lift and project for mixed 0-1 programming, pseudo-Boolean optimization, scheduling and assignment problems, production planning, location, bin packing, cutting planes, vehicle routing, and applications to graph theory, mechanics, chip design, etc.

Key features:
state of the art surveys
comprehensiveness
prominent authors
theoretical, computational and applied aspects.

This book is a reprint of "Discrete Applied Mathematics" Volume 23, Numbers 1-3
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The relaxation method has enjoyed an intensive development during many decades and this new edition of this comprehensive text reflects in particular the main achievements in the past 20 years. Moreover, many further improvements and extensions are included, both in the direction of optimal control and optimal design as well as in numerics and applications in materials science, along with an updated treatment of the abstract parts of the theory.

This book contains thirty-five selected papers presented at the International Conference on Evolutionary and Deterministic Methods for Design, Optimization and Control with Applications to Industrial and Societal Problems (EUROGEN 2017). This was one of the Thematic Conferences of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS). Topics treated in the various chapters reflect the state of the art in theoretical and numerical methods and tools for optimization, and engineering design and societal applications. The volume focuses particularly on intelligent systems for multidisciplinary design optimization (mdo) problems based on multi-hybridized software, adjoint-based and one-shot methods, uncertainty quantification and optimization, multidisciplinary design optimization, applications of game theory to industrial optimization problems, applications in structural and civil engineering optimum design and surrogate models based optimization methods in aerodynamic design.

There is an enhanced level of connectivity available in modern society through the increased usage of various technological devices. Such developments have led to the integration of smart objects into the Internet of Things (IoT), an emerging paradigm in the digital age. Game Theory Solutions for the Internet of Things: Emerging Research and Opportunities examines the latest strategies for the management of IoT systems and the application of theoretical models to enhance real-world applications and improve system efficiency. Highlighting innovative algorithms and methods, as well as coverage on cloud computing, cross-domain applications, and energy control, this book is a pivotal source of information for researchers, practitioners, graduate students, professionals, and academics interested in the game theoretic solutions for IoT applications.

Written engagingly and with agreeable humour, this book balances a light touch with a rigorous yet economical account of the theory of games and bargaining models. It provides a precise interpretation, discussion and mathematical analysis for a wide range of game-like problems in economics, sociology, strategic studies and war.
There is first an informal introduction to game theory, which can be understood by non-mathematicians, which covers the basic ideas of extensive form, pure and mixed strategies and the minimax theorem. The general theory of non-cooperative games is then given a detailed mathematical treatment in the second chapter. Next follows a first class account of linear programming, theory and practice, terse, rigorous and readable, which is applied as a tool to matrix games and economics from duality theory via the equilibrium theorem, with detailed explanations of computational aspects of the simplex algorithm.
The remaining chapters give an unusually comprehensive but concise treatment of cooperative games, an original account of bargaining models, with a skillfully guided tour through the Shapley and Nash solutions for bimatrix games and a carefully illustrated account of finding the best threat strategies.
Balances a light touch with a rigorous yet economical account of the theory of games and bargaining modelsShows basic ideas of extensive form, pure and mixed strategies, the minimax theorem, non-cooperative and co-operative games, and a first class account of linear programming, theory and practiceBased on a series of lectures given by the author in the theory of games at Royal Holloway College"