The pace of development in knowledge and know-how in the Organisation Sciences, Logistics and Information Technology is rapid. However, the gap between those who practice these sciences and the practicing manager is becoming larger rather than smaller. The Delft Systems Approach describes a fundamental approach for analysing industrial systems, which emphasizes a concept that can be used by all disciplines involved. It sets out to close the gap between theory and practice.

The pace of development in knowledge and know-how in the Organisation Sciences, Logistics and Information Technology is rapid. However, the gap between those who practice these sciences and the practicing manager is becoming larger rather than smaller. The Delft Systems Approach sets out to close the gap between theory and practice, and to achieve the following goals:

• To improve the conception of a design in order to obtain a better match between expected and real operation of a (future) industrial system.
• To integrate structural and behavioural conceptions of a system to be designed.
• To support the communication between different specialists, both being involved in the same processes and projects.
• To guide managers in applying this knowledge to the problems with which they are confronted in practice.
• To communicate knowledge and understanding of that part of Systems Theory, which will enable managers to further improve their performance and/or to reduce their workload.

The Delft Systems Approach is divided into three parts. Part I principally describes a fundamental approach for analysing industrial systems, which emphasizes a concept that can be used by all disciplines involved, and makes a logical systematic combination of quantitative and qualitative modelling. This approach is used for the analysis of industrial systems. Part II is concerned with the use of these models in the design of (future) systems. Finally, Part III contains three comprehensive cases from the authorsa (TM) own practical experiences. All theoretical concepts are directly illustrated with a practical example.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Internet and Distributed Computing Systems, IDCS 2016, held in Wuhan, China, in September 2016. The 30 full papers and 18 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: body sensor networks and wearable devices; cloud computing and networking; distributed computing and big data; distributed scheduling and optimization; internet of things and its application; smart networked transportation and logistics; and big data and social networks.