This book presents the proceedings of the Eighth National Conference of the Italian Systems Society. The contributions underline the need for Systemics and Systems Science in order to address multiple, changing systems involving several coherent versions. The conference focused on identifying, discussing, and understanding possible interrelationships between fundamental theoretical advances in different disciplines. Given their scope, these proceedings represent a valuable asset for all researchers whose work involves multiple systems.
The picture on the front cover of this book depicts a young man pulling a fishnet, a task of practical relevance for many centuries. It is a complex task, involving load transmission throughout the body, intricate balance, and eye head-hand coordination. The quest toward understanding how we perform such tasks with skill and grace, often in the presence of unpredictable pertur bations, has a long history. However, despite a history of magnificent sculptures and drawings of the human body which vividly depict muscle ac tivity and interaction, until more recent times our state of knowledge of human movement was rather primitive. During the past century this has changed; we now have developed a considerable database regarding the com position and basic properties of muscle and nerve tissue and the basic causal relations between neural function and biomechanical movement. Over the last few decades we have also seen an increased appreciation of the impor tance of musculoskeletal biomechanics: the neuromotor system must control movement within a world governed by mechanical laws. We have now col lected quantitative data for a wealth of human movements. Our capacity to understand the data we collect has been enhanced by our continually evolving modeling capabilities and by the availability of computational power. What have we learned? This book is designed to help synthesize our current knowledge regarding the role of muscles in human movement. The study of human movement is not a mature discipline.
Systems with sub-processes evolving on many different time scales are ubiquitous in applications: chemical reactions, electro-optical and neuro-biological systems, to name just a few. This volume contains papers that expose the state of the art in mathematical techniques for analyzing such systems. Recently developed geometric ideas are highlighted in this work that includes a theory of relaxation-oscillation phenomena in higher dimensional phase spaces. Subtle exponentially small effects result from singular perturbations implicit in certain multiple time scale systems. Their role in the slow motion of fronts, bifurcations, and jumping between invariant tori are all explored here. Neurobiology has played a particularly stimulating role in the development of these techniques and one paper is directed specifically at applying geometric singular perturbation theory to reveal the synchrony in networks of neural oscillators.
Many schools have implemented academic response to intervention (RTI) and schoolwide positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) as separate initiatives. This book provides keys to making these programs more effective, seamless, efficient, and sustainable by combining them into a single multi-tiered system of support (MTSS). Steps and strategies are outlined for integrating data structures, practices, teams, and district systems. Contributing authors present detailed case examples of successful MTSS implementation in three states. In a large-size format with lay-flat binding, the book features 27 reproducible checklists and evaluation tools. Purchasers get access to a companion website where they can download and print the reproducible materials plus other helpful resources. This book is in The Guilford Practical Intervention in the Schools Series, edited by T. Chris Riley-Tillman.
The first comprehensive book to uniquely combine the three fields of systems engineering, operations/production systems, and multiple criteria decision making/optimization Systems engineering is the art and science of designing, engineering, and building complex systems—combining art, science, management, and engineering disciplines. Operations and Production Systems with Multiple Objectives covers all classical topics of operations and production systems as well as new topics not seen in any similiar textbooks before: small-scale design of cellular systems, large-scale design of complex systems, clustering, productivity and efficiency measurements, and energy systems. Filled with completely new perspectives, paradigms, and robust methods of solving classic and modern problems, the book includes numerous examples and sample spreadsheets for solving each problem, a solutions manual, and a book companion site complete with worked examples and supplemental articles. Operations and Production Systems with Multiple Objectives will teach readers: How operations and production systems are designed and planned How operations and production systems are engineered and optimized How to formulate and solve manufacturing systems problems How to model and solve interdisciplinary and systems engineering problems How to solve decision problems with multiple and conflicting objectives This book is ideal for senior undergraduate, MS, and PhD graduate students in all fields of engineering, business, and management as well as practitioners and researchers in systems engineering, operations, production, and manufacturing.
Methodological Guidelines for Modeling and Developing MAS-Based Simulations The intersection of agents, modeling, simulation, and application domains has been the subject of active research for over two decades. Although agents and simulation have been used effectively in a variety of application domains, much of the supporting research remains scattered in the literature, too often leaving scientists to develop multi-agent system (MAS) models and simulations from scratch. Multi-Agent Systems: Simulation and Applications provides an overdue review of the wide ranging facets of MAS simulation, including methodological and application-oriented guidelines. This comprehensive resource reviews two decades of research in the intersection of MAS, simulation, and different application domains. It provides scientists and developers with disciplined engineering approaches to modeling and developing MAS-based simulations. After providing an overview of the field’s history and its basic principles, as well as cataloging the various simulation engines for MAS, the book devotes three sections to current and emerging approaches and applications. Simulation for MAS — explains simulation support for agent decision making, the use of simulation for the design of self-organizing systems, the role of software architecture in simulating MAS, and the use of simulation for studying learning and stigmergic interaction. MAS for Simulation — discusses an agent-based framework for symbiotic simulation, the use of country databases and expert systems for agent-based modeling of social systems, crowd-behavior modeling, agent-based modeling and simulation of adult stem cells, and agents for traffic simulation. Tools — presents a number of representative platforms and tools for MAS and simulation, including Jason, James II, SeSAm, and RoboCup Rescue. Complete with over 200 figures and formulas, this reference book provides the necessary overview of experiences with MAS simulation and the tools needed to exploit simulation in MAS for future research in a vast array of applications including home security, computational systems biology, and traffic management.
In this book, Jacques Ferber has brought together all the recent developments in the field of multi-agent systems - an area that has seen increasing interest and major developments over the last few years. The author draws on work carried out in various disciplines, including information technology, sociology and cognitive psychology to provide a coherent and instructive picture of the current state-of-the-art. The book introduces and defines the fundamental concepts that need to be understood, clearly describes the work that has been done, and invites readers to reflect upon the possibilities of the future.
This book covers the uses of tropical farming systems in tropics of mixed, strip, relay, sequential and multistorey cropping. It discusses the aspects of the tropical farming systems including their history and agronomy and the plant inter-relationship within them.
Details a real-world product that applies a cutting-edge multi-core architecture Increasingly demanding modern applications—such as those used in telecommunications networking and real-time processing of audio, video, and multimedia streams—require multiple processors to achieve computational performance at the rate of a few giga-operations per second. This necessity for speed and manageable power consumption makes it likely that the next generation of embedded processing systems will include hundreds of cores, while being increasingly programmable, blending processors and configurable hardware in a power-efficient manner. Multi-Core Embedded Systems presents a variety of perspectives that elucidate the technical challenges associated with such increased integration of homogeneous (processors) and heterogeneous multiple cores. It offers an analysis that industry engineers and professionals will need to understand the physical details of both software and hardware in embedded architectures, as well as their limitations and potential for future growth. Discusses the available programming models spread across different abstraction levels The book begins with an overview of the evolution of multiprocessor architectures for embedded applications and discusses techniques for autonomous power management of system-level parameters. It addresses the use of existing open-source (and free) tools originating from several application domains—such as traffic modeling, graph theory, parallel computing and network simulation. In addition, the authors cover other important topics associated with multi-core embedded systems, such as: Architectures and interconnects Embedded design methodologies Mapping of applications
