In earlier forewords to the books in this series on Discrete Event Dynamic Systems (DEDS), we have dwelt on the pervasive nature of DEDS in our human-made world. From manufacturing plants to computer/communication networks, from traffic systems to command-and-control, modern civilization cannot function without the smooth operation of such systems. Yet mathemat ical tools for the analysis and synthesis of DEDS are nascent when compared to the well developed machinery of the continuous variable dynamic systems char acterized by differential equations. The performance evaluation tool of choice...

Over the past two decades, economic theory has extended its field of application to non-market goods such as environmental resources and health. Although it is impossible to assign a price to these goods on the basis of market mechanisms alone, the fact that they have no price does not mean that they have no value. One technique in which economists have shown a marked interest is the contingent valuation method (CVM), which has mainly been used to assign a monetary value to environmental goods. It was first applied to natural resources used for recreational purposes. CVM has been applied to...

Initial public offerings (IPOs) play a crucial role in allocating resources in market economies. Because of the enormous importance of IPOs, an understanding of how IPOs work is fundamental to an understanding of financial markets generally. Of particular interest is the puzzling existence of high initial returns to equity IPOs in the United States and other free-market economies.
Audience: Designed for use by anyone wishing to perform further academic research in the area of IPOs and by those practitioners interested in IPOs as investment vehicles.

Object-oriented techniques and languages have been proven to significantly increase engineering efficiency in software development. Many benefits are expected from their introduction into electronic modeling. Among them are better support for model reusability and flexibility, more efficient system modeling, and more possibilities in design space exploration and prototyping. Object-Oriented Modeling explores the latest techniques in object-oriented methods, formalisms and hardware description language extensions.
The seven chapters comprising this book provide an overview of...

Co-Design is the set of emerging techniques which allows for the simultaneous design of Hardware and Software. In many cases where the application is very demanding in terms of various performances (time, surface, power consumption), trade-offs between dedicated hardware and dedicated software are becoming increasingly difficult to decide upon in the early stages of a design. Verification techniques - such as simulation or proof techniques - that have proven necessary in the hardware design must be dramatically adapted to the simultaneous verification of Software and Hardware.
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The rapid development of wireless digital communication technology has cre ated capabilities that software systems are only beginning to exploit. The falling cost of both communication and of mobile computing devices (laptop computers, hand-held computers, etc. ) is making wireless computing affordable not only to business users but also to consumers. Mobile computing is not a "scaled-down" version of the established and we- studied field of distributed computing. The nature of wireless communication media and the mobility of computers combine to create fundamentally new problems in...

The field of Digital Signal Processing has developed so fast in the last two decades that it can be found in the graduate and undergraduate programs of most universities. This development is related to the growing available techno logies for implementing digital signal processing algorithms. The tremendous growth of development in the digital signal processing area has turned some of its specialized areas into fields themselves. If accurate information of the signals to be processed is available, the designer can easily choose the most appropriate algorithm to process the signal. When dealing...

Hardware description languages (HDL) such as VHDL and Verilog have found their way into almost every aspect of the design of digital hardware systems. Since their inception they gradually proved to be an essential part of modern design methodologies and design automation tools, ever exceeding their original goals of being description and simulation languages. Their use for automatic synthesis, formal proof, and testing are good examples.
So far, HDLs have been mainly dealing with digital systems. However, integrated systems designed today require more and more analog parts such as A/D...

Fuzzy Logic Foundations and Industrial Applications is an organized edited collection of contributed chapters covering basic fuzzy logic theory, fuzzy linear programming, and applications. Special emphasis has been given to coverage of recent research results, and to industrial applications of fuzzy logic.
The chapters are new works that have been written exclusively for this book by many of the leading and prominent researchers (such as Ronald Yager, Ellen Hisdal, Etienne Kerre, and others) in this field. The contributions are original and each chapter is self-contained. The...

A logic view of 0-1 integer programming problems, providing new insights into the structure of problems that can lead the researcher to more effective solution techniques depending on the problem class. Operations research techniques are integrated into a logic programming environment. The first monographic treatment that begins to unify these two methodological approaches.
Logic-based methods for modelling and solving combinatorial problems have recently started to play a significant role in both theory and practice. The application of logic to combinatorial problems has a dual aspect....