This SpringerBrief reviews the existing market-oriented strategies for economically managing resource allocation in distributed systems. It describes three new schemes that address cost-efficiency, user incentives, and allocation fairness with regard to different scheduling contexts. The first scheme, taking the Amazon EC2 (TM) market as a case of study, investigates the optimal resource rental planning models based on linear integer programming and stochastic optimization techniques. This model is useful to explore the interaction between the cloud infrastructure provider and the cloud resource customers. The second scheme targets a free-trade resource market, studying the interactions amongst multiple rational resource traders. Leveraging an optimization framework from AI, this scheme examines the spontaneous exchange of resources among multiple resource owners. Finally, the third scheme describes an experimental market-oriented resource sharing platform inspired by eBay's transaction model. The study presented in this book sheds light on economic models and their implication to the utility-oriented scheduling problems.

Solid cellular materials (foams, lattice materials, honeycombs, etc.) are attractive and have resulted in the creation of an active subject for structural, mechanical and material scientists in recent years. Indeed, constant progress in the manufacturing techniques are improving their properties and reducing their costs; and mass productions and industrial applications are beginning. An important mechanical problem is how to characterize and model the mechanical behaviour of these materials, which is necessary for industrial design and numerical predictions involved in various applications such as light weight structures, energy absorbers. This volume contains twenty-two contributions written by distinguished invited speakers from all part of the world to the iutam symposium on mechanical properties of cellular materials. It provides a survey on recent advances in the characterisation and modeling of the mechanical properties of solid cellular materials under static and dynamic loading as well as their applications in lightweight structures analysis and design. This volume will be of interest to structural, mechanical and material scientists and engineers working on different aspects of this new class of materials (for example in microstructure observation, micromechanical and multiscale modeling, phenomenological models, structural impact behaviour and numerical validation).

Solid cellular materials (foams, lattice materials, honeycombs, etc.) are attractive and have resulted in the creation of an active subject for structural, mechanical and material scientists in recent years. Indeed, constant progress in the manufacturing techniques are improving their properties and reducing their costs; and mass productions and industrial applications are beginning. An important mechanical problem is how to characterize and model the mechanical behaviour of these materials, which is necessary for industrial design and numerical predictions involved in various applications such as light weight structures, energy absorbers.

This volume contains twenty-two contributions written by distinguished invited speakers from all part of the world to the iutam symposium on mechanical properties of cellular materials. It provides a survey on recent advances in the characterisation and modeling of the mechanical properties of solid cellular materials under static and dynamic loading as well as their applications in lightweight structures analysis and design. This volume will be of interest to structural, mechanical and material scientists and engineers working on different aspects of this new class of materials (for example in microstructure observation, micromechanical and multiscale modeling, phenomenological models, structural impact behaviour and numerical validation).