This book presents modern approaches to improving the energy efficiency, safety and environmental performance of industrial processes and products, based on the application of advanced trends in Green Information Technologies (IT) Engineering to components, networks and complex systems (software, programmable and hardware components, communications, Cloud and IoT-based systems, as well as IT infrastructures). The book's 16 chapters, prepared by authors from Greece, Malaysia, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom, are grouped into four sections: (1) The Green Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and Data Mining, (2) Green Mobile and Embedded Control Systems, (3) Green Logic and FPGA Design, and (4) Green IT for Industry and Smart Grids. The book will motivate researchers and engineers from different IT domains to develop, implement and propagate green values in complex systems. Further, it will benefit all scientists and graduate students pursuing research in computer science with a focus on green IT engineering.

This book highlights recent research on sustainable production. In today's manufacturing industry, cleaner production has become a central goal. "Sustainable production" describes activities that pose no threat to future generations and are not pursued at their expense. In addition, sustainable production is a concept that can improve environmental performance and focuses on technical aspects that can be used to improve efficiency and productivity. Sustainable production is not limited to the manufacturing sector, but affects all production sectors including energy, environment, and material systems - all of which face significant challenges in connection with sustainability, e.g. efforts to reduce production's impact on the environment and to manage health and safety impacts. Key means of reducing environmental pollution from manufacturing involve reducing the main resources used in production (metals used in the machining processes, fluids/oils in production, water, and energy).

This book presents an authoritative collection of contributions reporting on fuzzy logic and decision theory, together with applications and case studies in economics and management science. Dedicated to Professor Jaume Gil Aluja in recognition of his pioneering work, the book reports on theories, methods and new challenges, thus offering not only a timely reference guide but also a source of new ideas and inspirations for graduate students and researchers alike.

The papers collected in this volume focus on new perspectives on individuals, society, and science, specifically in the field of socio-economic systems. The book is the result of a scientific collaboration among experts from "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iasi (Romania), "G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy), "University of Defence" of Brno (Czech Republic), and "Pablo de Olavide" University of Sevilla (Spain). The heterogeneity of the contributions presented in this volume reflects the variety and complexity of social phenomena. The book is divided in four Sections as follows. The first Section deals with recent trends in social decisions. Specifically, it aims to understand which are the driving forces of social decisions. The second Section focuses on the social and public sphere. Indeed, it is oriented on recent developments in social systems and control. Trends in quantitative theories and models are described in Section 3, where many new formal, mathematical-statistical tools for modelling complex social phenomena are presented. Finally, Section 4 shows integrative theories and models; particularly, it deals with the ethical, cultural and political approaches to social science, the pedagogical methods, and the relationship between literature, politics, religion and society. The book is addressed to sociologists, philosophers, mathematicians, statisticians, people interested in ethics, and specialists in the fields of communication, social, and political sciences.

This book provides readers with a timely and comprehensive yet concise view on the field of fuzzy logic and its real-world applications. The chapters, written by authoritative scholars in the field, report on promising new models for data analysis, decision making, and systems modeling, with a special emphasis on their applications in management science. The book is a token of appreciation from the fuzzy research community to Professor Christer Carlsson for his long time research and organizational commitment, which have among other things resulted in the foundation and success of the Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research (IAMSR) at Abo Akademi University, in Abo (Turku), Finland. The book serves as timely guide for the fuzzy logic and operations research communities alike.

This volume presents a collection of original research works by leading specialists focusing on novel and promising approaches in which the multi-agent system paradigm is used to support, enhance or replace traditional approaches to solving difficult optimization problems. The editors have invited several well-known specialists to present their solutions, tools, and models falling under the common denominator of the agent-based optimization. The book consists of eight chapters covering examples of application of the multi-agent paradigm and respective customized tools to solve difficult optimization problems arising in different areas such as machine learning, scheduling, transportation and, more generally, distributed and cooperative problem solving.

This book describes the implementation of green IT in various human and industrial domains. Consisting of four sections: "Development and Optimization of Green IT", "Modelling and Experiments with Green IT Systems", "Industry and Transport Green IT Systems", "Social, Educational and Business Aspects of Green IT", it presents results in two areas - the green components, networks, cloud and IoT systems and infrastructures; and the industry, business, social and education domains. It discusses hot topics such as programmable embedded and mobile systems, sustainable software and data centers, Internet servicing and cyber social computing, assurance cases and lightweight cryptography in context of green IT. Intended for university students, lecturers and researchers who are interested in power saving and sustainable computing, the book also appeals to engineers and managers of companies that develop and implement energy efficient IT applications.

This book presents recent applications and approaches as well as challenges in digital forensic science. One of the evolving challenges that is covered in the book is the cloud forensic analysis which applies the digital forensic science over the cloud computing paradigm for conducting either live or static investigations within the cloud environment. The book also covers the theme of multimedia forensics and watermarking in the area of information security. That includes highlights on intelligence techniques designed for detecting significant changes in image and video sequences. Moreover, the theme proposes recent robust and computationally efficient digital watermarking techniques. The last part of the book provides several digital forensics related applications, including areas such as evidence acquisition enhancement, evidence evaluation, cryptography, and finally, live investigation through the importance of reconstructing the botnet attack scenario to show the malicious activities and files as evidences to be presented in a court.

This volume provides a comprehensive state of the art overview of a series of advanced trends and concepts that have recently been proposed in the area of green information technologies engineering as well as of design and development methodologies for models and complex systems architectures and their intelligent components. The contributions included in the volume have their roots in the authors' presentations, and vivid discussions that have followed the presentations, at a series of workshop and seminars held within the international TEMPUS-project GreenCo project in United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal, Sweden and the Ukraine, during 2013-2015 and at the 1st - 5th Workshops on Green and Safe Computing (GreenSCom) held in Russia, Slovakia and the Ukraine. The book presents a systematic exposition of research on principles, models, components and complex systems and a description of industry- and society-oriented aspects of the green IT engineering. A chapter-oriented structure has been adopted for this book following a "vertical view" of the green IT, from hardware (CPU and FPGA) and software components to complex industrial systems. The 15 chapters of the book are grouped into five sections: (1) Methodology and Principles of Green IT Engineering for Complex Systems, (2) Green Components and Programmable Systems, (3) Green Internet Computing, Cloud and Communication Systems, (4) Modeling and Assessment of Green Computer Systems and Infrastructures, and (5) Gree

This volume presents recent research, challenging problems and solutions in Intelligent Systems- covering the following disciplines: artificial and computational intelligence, fuzzy logic and other non-classic logics, intelligent database systems, information retrieval, information fusion, intelligent search (engines), data mining, cluster analysis, unsupervised learning, machine learning, intelligent data analysis, (group) decision support systems, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, knowledge-based systems, imprecision and uncertainty handling, electronic commerce, distributed systems, etc. The book defines a common ground for sometimes seemingly disparate problems and addresses them by using the paradigm of broadly perceived intelligent systems. It presents a broad panorama of a multitude of theoretical and practical problems which have been successfully dealt with using the paradigm of intelligent computing.

This book is the proceedings of the 3rd World Conference on Soft Computing (WCSC), which was held in San Antonio, TX, USA, on December 16-18, 2013. It presents start-of-the-art theory and applications of soft computing together with an in-depth discussion of current and future challenges in the field, providing readers with a 360 degree view on soft computing. Topics range from fuzzy sets, to fuzzy logic, fuzzy mathematics, neuro-fuzzy systems, fuzzy control, decision making in fuzzy environments, image processing and many more. The book is dedicated to Lotfi A. Zadeh, a renowned specialist in signal analysis and control systems research who proposed the idea of fuzzy sets, in which an element may have a partial membership, in the early 1960s, followed by the idea of fuzzy logic, in which a statement can be true only to a certain degree, with degrees described by numbers in the interval [0,1]. The performance of fuzzy systems can often be improved with the help of optimization techniques, e.g. evolutionary computation, and by endowing the corresponding system with the ability to learn, e.g. by combining fuzzy systems with neural networks. The resulting "consortium" of fuzzy, evolutionary, and neural techniques is known as soft computing and is the main focus of this book.

This book describes recent advances on hybrid intelligent systems using soft computing techniques for diverse areas of application, such as intelligent control and robotics, pattern recognition, time series prediction and optimization complex problems. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several intelligent computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks and bio-inspired optimization algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems. The book is organized in five main parts, which contain a group of papers around a similar subject. The first part consists of papers with the main theme of type-2 fuzzy logic, which basically consists of papers that propose new models and applications for type-2 fuzzy systems. The second part contains papers with the main theme of bio-inspired optimization algorithms, which are basically papers using nature-inspired techniques to achieve optimization of complex optimization problems in diverse areas of application. The third part contains papers that deal with new models and applications of neural networks in real world problems. The fourth part contains papers with the theme of intelligent optimization methods, which basically consider the proposal of new methods of optimization to solve complex real world optimization problems. The fifth part contains papers with the theme of evolutionary methods and intelligent computing, which are papers considering soft computing methods for applications related to diverse areas, such as natural language processing, recommending systems and optimization.

This book highlights recent advances in the design of hybrid intelligent systems based on nature-inspired optimization and their application in areas such as intelligent control and robotics, pattern recognition, time series prediction, and optimization of complex problems. The book is divided into seven main parts, the first of which addresses theoretical aspects of and new concepts and algorithms based on type-2 and intuitionistic fuzzy logic systems. The second part focuses on neural network theory, and explores the applications of neural networks in diverse areas, such as time series prediction and pattern recognition. The book's third part presents enhancements to meta-heuristics based on fuzzy logic techniques and describes new nature-inspired optimization algorithms that employ fuzzy dynamic adaptation of parameters, while the fourth part presents diverse applications of nature-inspired optimization algorithms. In turn, the fifth part investigates applications of fuzzy logic in diverse areas, such as time series prediction and pattern recognition. The sixth part examines new optimization algorithms and their applications. Lastly, the seventh part is dedicated to the design and application of different hybrid intelligent systems.

This book is a tribute to Professor Jacek Zurada, who is best known for his contributions to computational intelligence and knowledge-based neurocomputing. It is dedicated to Professor Jacek Zurada, Full Professor at the Computational Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, J.B. Speed School of Engineering, University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA, as a token of appreciation for his scientific and scholarly achievements, and for his longstanding service to many communities, notably the computational intelligence community, in particular neural networks, machine learning, data analyses and data mining, but also the fuzzy logic and evolutionary computation communities, to name but a few. At the same time, the book recognizes and honors Professor Zurada's dedication and service to many scientific, scholarly and professional societies, especially the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), the world's largest professional technical professional organization dedicated to advancing science and technology in a broad spectrum of areas and fields. The volume is divided into five major parts, the first of which addresses theoretic, algorithmic and implementation problems related to the intelligent use of data in the sense of how to derive practically useful information and knowledge from data. In turn, Part 2 is devoted to various aspects of neural networks and connectionist systems. Part 3 deals with essential tools and techniques for intelligent technologies in systems modeling and Part 4 focuses on intelligent technologies in decision-making, optimization and control, while Part 5 explores the applications of intelligent technologies.

This book presents recent advances in the field of intelligent systems. Composed of fourteen selected chapters, it covers a wide range of research that varies from applications in industrial data science to those in applied science. Today the word INNOVATION is more and more connected with the words INTELLIGENT and SECURITY, as such the book discusses the theory and applications of hot topics such as big data, education applications of robots with different levels of autonomy, knowledge-based modeling and control of complex dynamical systems, sign-based synthesis of behavior, security issues with intelligent systems, innovative intelligent control design, neuromorphic computation, data-driven classification, intelligent modeling and measurement innovations, multisensor data association, personal education assistants, a modern production architecture, study of peer review and scientometrics, intelligent research on bug report data, and clustering non-Gaussian data. The broad and varied research discussed represents the mainstream of contemporary intelligent innovations that are slowly but surely changing the world.

The unexpected and premature passing away of Professor Ebrahim H. "Abe" Mamdani on January, 22, 2010, was a big shock to the scientific community, to all his friends and colleagues around the world, and to his close relatives. Professor Mamdani was a remarkable figure in the academic world, as he contributed to so many areas of science and technology. Of great relevance are his latest thoughts and ideas on the study of language and its handling by computers. The fuzzy logic community is particularly indebted to Abe Mamdani (1941-2010) who, in 1975, in his famous paper An Experiment in Linguistic Synthesis with a Fuzzy Logic Controller, jointly written with his student Sedrak Assilian, introduced the novel idea of fuzzy control. This was an elegant engineering approach to the modeling and control of complex processes for which mathematical models were unknown or too difficult to build, yet they could effectively and efficiently be controlled by human operators. This ground-breaking idea has found innumerable applications and can be considered as one of the main factors for the proliferation and adoption of fuzzy logic technology. Professor Mamdani's own life and vital experience are illustrative of his "never surrendering" attitude while facing adversaries, which is normal for a person proposing any novel solution, and represent a great example for everybody. His subtle sense of humor, his joy for life, and his will to critically help people, especially young people, were characteristics deeply appreciated by all the people who enjoyed and benefited from his friendship and advice. This book constitutes a posthumous homage to Abe Mamdani. It is a collection of original papers related in some way to his works, ideas and vision, and especially written by researchers directly acquainted with him or with his work. The underlying goal of this book will be fulfilled if, in the very spirit of Mamdani's legacy, the papers will trigger a scientific or philosophical debate on the issues covered, or contribute to a cross-fertilization of ideas in the various fields.

This book highlights practical quantum key distribution systems and research on the implementations of next-generation quantum communication, as well as photonic quantum device technologies. It discusses how the advances in quantum computing and quantum physics have allowed the building, launching and deploying of space exploration systems that are capable of more and more as they become smaller and lighter. It also presents theoretical and experimental research on the potential and limitations of secure communication and computation with quantum devices, and explores how security can be preserved in the presence of a quantum computer, and how to achieve long-distance quantum communication. The development of a real quantum computer is still in the early stages, but a number of research groups have investigated the theoretical possibilities of such computers.

This book presents recent advances on the design of intelligent systems based on fuzzy logic, neural networks and nature-inspired optimization and their application in areas such as, intelligent control and robotics, pattern recognition, time series prediction and optimization of complex problems. The book is organized in eight main parts, which contain a group of papers around a similar subject. The first part consists of papers with the main theme of theoretical aspects of fuzzy logic, which basically consists of papers that propose new concepts and algorithms based on fuzzy systems. The second part contains papers with the main theme of neural networks theory, which are basically papers dealing with new concepts and algorithms in neural networks. The third part contains papers describing applications of neural networks in diverse areas, such as time series prediction and pattern recognition. The fourth part contains papers describing new nature-inspired optimization algorithms. The fifth part presents diverse applications of nature-inspired optimization algorithms. The sixth part contains papers describing new optimization algorithms. The seventh part contains papers describing applications of fuzzy logic in diverse areas, such as time series prediction and pattern recognition. Finally, the eighth part contains papers that present enhancements to meta-heuristics based on fuzzy logic techniques.

This volume is a brief, yet comprehensive account of new development, tools, techniques and solutions in the broadly perceived "intelligent systems". New concepts and ideas concern the development of effective and efficient models which would make it possible to effectively and efficiently describe and solve processes in various areas of science and technology. Special emphasis is on the dealing with uncertainty and imprecision that permeates virtually all real world processes and phenomena, and has to properly be modeled by formal and algorithmic tools and techniques so that they be adequate and useful. The papers in this volume concern a wide array of possible techniques exemplified by, on the one hand, logic, probabilistic, fuzzy, intuitionistic fuzzy, neuro-fuzzy, etc. approaches. On the other hand, they represent the use of such systems modeling tools as generalized nets, optimization and control models, systems analytic models, etc. They concerns a variety of approaches, from pattern recognition, image analysis, education system modeling, biological and medical systems modeling, etc.

This book presents an authoritative collection of contributions by researchers from 16 different countries (Austria, Chile, Georgia, Germany, Mexico, Norway, P.R. of China, Poland, North Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and United States) that report on recent developments and new directions in advanced control systems, together with new theoretical findings, industrial applications and case studies on complex engineering systems. This book is dedicated to Professor Vsevolod Mykhailovych Kuntsevich, an Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and President of the National Committee of the Ukrainian Association on Automatic Control, in recognition of his pioneering works, his great scientific and scholarly achievements, and his years of service to many scientific and professional communities, notably those involved in automation, cybernetics, control, management and, more specifically, the fundamentals and applications of tools and techniques for dealing with uncertain information, robustness, non-linearity, extremal systems, discrete control systems, adaptive control systems and others. Covering essential theories, methods and new challenges in control systems design, the book is not only a timely reference guide but also a source of new ideas and inspirations for graduate students and researchers alike. Its 15 chapters are grouped into four sections: (a) fundamental theoretical issues in complex engineering systems, (b) artificial intelligence and soft computing for control and decision-making systems, (c) advanced control techniques for industrial and collaborative automation, and (d) modern applications for management and information processing in complex systems. All chapters are intended to provide an easy-to-follow introduction to the topics addressed, including the most relevant references. At the same time, they reflect various aspects of the latest research work being conducted around the world and, therefore, provide information on the state of the art.

This book has brought 24 groups of experts and active researchers around the world together in image processing and analysis, video processing and analysis, and communications related processing, to present their newest research results, exchange latest experiences and insights, and explore future directions in these important and rapidly evolving areas. It aims at increasing the synergy between academic and industry professionals working in the related field. It focuses on the state-of-the-art research in various essential areas related to emerging technologies, standards and applications on analysis, processing, computing, and communication of multimedia information. The target audience of this book is researchers and engineers as well as graduate students working in various disciplines linked to multimedia analysis, processing and communications, e.g., computer vision, pattern recognition, information technology, image processing, and artificial intelligence. The book is also meant to a broader audience including practicing professionals working in image/video applications such as image processing, video surveillance, multimedia indexing and retrieval, and so on. We hope that the researchers, engineers, students and other professionals who read this book would find it informative, useful and inspirational toward their own work in one way or another.

This volume presents various aspects of non-integer order systems, also known as fractional systems, which have recently attracted an increasing attention in the scientific community of systems science, applied mathematics, control theory. Non-integer systems have become relevant for many fields of science and technology exemplified by the modeling of signal transmission, electric noise, dielectric polarization, heat transfer, electrochemical reactions, thermal processes, acoustics, etc. The content is divided into six parts, every of which considers one of the currently relevant problems. In the first part the Realization problem is discussed, with a special focus on positive systems. The second part considers stability of certain classes of non-integer order systems with and without delays. The third part is focused on such important aspects as controllability, observability and optimization especially in discrete time. The fourth part is focused on distributed systems where non-integer calculus leads to new and interesting results. The next part considers problems of solutions and approximations of non-integer order equations and systems. The final and most extensive part is devoted to applications. Problems from mechatronics, biomedical engineering, robotics and others are all analyzed and solved with tools from fractional systems. This volume came to fruition thanks to high level of talks and interesting discussions at RRNR 2013 - 5th Conference on Non-integer Order Calculus and its Applications that took place at AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland, which was organized by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Automatics, Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering.

Optimization is an extremely important area in science and technology which provides powerful and useful tools and techniques for the formulation and solution of a multitude of problems in which we wish, or need, to to find a best possible option or solution. The volume is divided into a coupe of parts which present various aspects of fuzzyoptimization, some related more general issues, and applications.

This book presents a broad spectrum of problems related to statistics, mathematics, teaching, social science, and economics as well as a range of tools and techniques that can be used to solve these problems. It is the result of a scientific collaboration between experts in the field of economic and social systems from the University of Defence in Brno (Czech Republic), G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy), Pablo de Olavid eUniversity of Sevilla (Spain), and Ovidius University in Constanta, (Romania). The studies included were selected using a peer-review process and reflect heterogeneity and complexity of economic and social phenomena. They and present interesting empirical research from around the globe and from several research fields, such as statistics, decision making, mathematics, complexity, psychology, sociology and economics. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part, "Recent trends in mathematical and statistical models for economic and social sciences", collects papers on quantitative matters, which propose mathematical and statistical models for social sciences, economics, finance, and business administration. The second part, "Recent trends in qualitative theories for economic and social sciences", includes papers on qualitative matters, which discuss social, economic, and teaching issues. It is an ideal reference work for all those researchers interested in recent quantitative and qualitative tools. Covering a wide range of topics, it appeals in equal measure to mathematicians, statisticians, sociologists, philosophers, and specialists in the fields of communication, social and political sciences.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to fuzzy methods for solving flow tasks in both transportation and networks. It analyzes the problems of minimum cost and maximum flow finding with fuzzy nonzero lower flow bounds, and describes solutions to minimum cost flow finding in a network with fuzzy arc capacities and transmission costs. After a concise introduction to flow theory and tasks, the book analyzes two important problems. The first is related to determining the maximum volume for cargo transportation in the presence of uncertain network parameters, such as environmental changes, measurement errors and repair work on the roads. These parameters are represented here as fuzzy triangular, trapezoidal numbers and intervals. The second problem concerns static and dynamic flow finding in networks under fuzzy conditions, and an effective method that takes into account the network's transit parameters is presented here. All in all, the book provides readers with a practical reference guide to state-of-the art fuzzy methods for solving flow tasks and offers a valuable resource for all researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of network theory, fuzzy models and decision-making.