Market-Based Control is a paradigm for controlling complex systems that would otherwise be very difficult to control, maintain, or expand. The purpose of this volume is to illustrate the utility of market-based control through a series of papers focusing on different applications. This volume, for the first time, brings together the research from a wide range of fields all using a market-based conceptual framework. The features of markets that have provided motivation for these works include decentralization, interacting agents, and some notion of a resource that needs to be allocated. The papers span a range including theoretical considerations, simulations, and implementations.

The first edited volume addressing analysis for unmanned vehicles, with focus on operations research rather than engineering The editors have a unique combination of extensive operational experience and technical expertise Chapters address a wide-ranging set of examples, domains and applications Accessible to a general readership and also informative for experts

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Intelligent Agents for Telecommunication Applications, IATA'98, held in Paris, France, in July 1998, in conjunction with the 1998 Agents World Conference. The book presents 17 revised full papers carefully selected for inclusion in the volume. The book is divided into topical sections on network architecture, network configuration and planning, network optimization, network management, agent-based architectures for service applications.

This book develops allocation mechanisms that aim to ensure an efficient resource allocation in modern IT-services. Recent methods of artificial intelligence, such as neural networks and reinforcement learning, and nature-oriented optimization methods, such as genetic algorithms and simulated annealing, are advanced and applied to allocation processes in distributed IT-infrastructures, or grid systems.

As the complexity of today's networked computer systems grows, they become increasingly difficult to understand, predict, and control. Addressing these challenges requires new approaches to building these systems. Adaptive, Dynamic, and Resilient Systems supplies readers with various perspectives of the critical infrastructure that systems of netwo

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2008, held in Dortmund, Germany, in September 2008. The 114 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 206 submissions. The conference covers a wide range of topics, such as evolutionary computation, quantum computation, molecular computation, neural computation, artificial life, swarm intelligence, artificial ant systems, artificial immune systems, self-organizing systems, emergent behaviors, and applications to real-world problems. The paper are organized in topical sections on formal theory, new techniques, experimental analysis, multiobjective optimization, hybrid methods, and applications.

The natural mission of Computational Science is to tackle all sorts of human problems and to work out intelligent automata aimed at alleviating the b- den of working out suitable tools for solving complex problems. For this reason ComputationalScience,thoughoriginatingfromtheneedtosolvethemostch- lenging problems in science and engineering (computational science is the key player in the ?ght to gain fundamental advances in astronomy, biology, che- stry, environmental science, physics and several other scienti?c and engineering disciplines) is increasingly turning its attention to all ?elds of human activity. In all activities, in fact, intensive computation, information handling, kn- ledge synthesis, the use of ad-hoc devices, etc. increasingly need to be exploited and coordinated regardless of the location of both the users and the (various and heterogeneous) computing platforms. As a result the key to understanding the explosive growth of this discipline lies in two adjectives that more and more appropriately refer to Computational Science and its applications: interoperable and ubiquitous. Numerous examples of ubiquitous and interoperable tools and applicationsaregiveninthepresentfourLNCSvolumescontainingthecontri- tions delivered at the 2004 International Conference on Computational Science and its Applications (ICCSA 2004) held in Assisi, Italy, May 14–17, 2004.