Manufacturing processes, scientific experiments, research programs, tax collection systems, are all endeavors once born as projects. Project engineering is the application of science to the development and analysis of project plans, and to the supervision of their realization. This book is a unified treatise on the technology of project planning and execution. It provides a systematic understanding of the different methodological approaches to the development and supervision of project plans. Readers are given a technical introduction to the main methodologies, such as graphs, activity networks, CPM, PERT, GERT, and Petri nets, and given guidance as to when and why to apply one technique rather than another. The book deliberately emphasizes those techniques which are particularly suitable to exploiting the power of computation, and therefore supplies a solid platform for applying computer tools to the analysis and control of projects. The book also introduces ODM, a methodology based on the theory of fuzzy sets for supporting plan execution supervisors in making operational choices. The book is self-contained. It is designed to serve professionals and students in the fields of systems engineering, computer aided planning, and decision support systems.

"Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better." advised Albert Einstein. In recent years, the research communities in Computer Science, Engineering, and other disciplines have taken this message to heart, and a relatively new field of "biologically-inspired computing" has been born. Inspiration is being drawn from nature, from the behaviors of colonies of ants, of swarms of bees and even the human body. This new paradigm in computing takes many simple autonomous objects or agents and lets them jointly perform a complex task, without having the need for centralized control. In this paradigm, these simple objects interact locally with their environment using simple rules. Applications include optimization algorithms, communications networks, scheduling and decision making, supply-chain management, and robotics, to name just a few. There are many disciplines involved in making such systems work: from artificial intelligence to energy aware systems. Often these disciplines have their own field of focus, have their own conferences, or only deal with specialized s- problems (e.g. swarm intelligence, biologically inspired computation, sensor networks). The Second IFIP Conference on Biologically-Inspired Collaborative Computing aims to bridge this separation of the scientific community and bring together researchers in the fields of Organic Computing, Autonomic Computing, Self-Organizing Systems, Pervasive Computing and related areas. We are very pleased to have two very important keynote presentations: Swarm Robotics: The Coordination of Robots via Swarm Intelligence Principles by Marco Dorigo (Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium), of which an abstract is included in this volume."

This volume presents a selection of papers presented at the 3rd European Workshop on Appl ications and Theory of Petri Nets that took place in Villa Monastero, Varenna (Italy) in the period September 27 - September 30, 1982. The I ist of topics included: nets and related models, mathematical analysis of nets, transformations and morphisms of nets, formal languages and nets, parallel program verification and nets, the pro blem of time in nets, programming languages based on nets, applications to distributed systems, applications to realtime systems, software ~~gineering, hardware design and its implementation, recoverability problems, nets and formal semantics; net tools. The diversity of topics on this list witnesses the fact that the researchers from very different areas presented their contributions and discussed various research problems during the workshop. This interaction of scientists looking at the area of Petri nets from very different points of view makes this series of workshops interesting and worthwi le. The volume documents the progress of the research concerning Petri nets during a one year time from the 2nd European Workshop held in Bad Honnef in 1981. We think that this was a substantial progress indeed. This observation is even more pleasant if one real izes that during the workshop in Varenna we have celebrated 20 years of "existence" of Petri nets (the seminal work by prof. C.A. Petri appeared precisely 20 years ago). We are very proud to present an invited address by prof. C.A. Petri in this volume.