Recently there has been increased interest in the development of computer-aided design programs to support the system level designer of integrated circuits more actively. Such design tools hold the promise of raising the level of abstraction at which an integrated circuit is designed, thus releasing the current designers from many of the details of logic and circuit level design. The promise further suggests that a whole new group of designers in neighboring engineering and science disciplines, with far less understanding of integrated circuit design, will also be able to increase their...

Over the past two decades, research in the theory of Petri nets and the development of graphical tools has yielded a powerful methodology. The contributions in Petri Nets in Flexible and Agile Automation present theoretical development of Petri nets as well as in industrial applications to areas such as discrete- event control design, scheduling, performance evaluation and deadlock avoidance. These contributions also include comparative studies of Petri nets and other approaches.
A primary theme of this book is to provide a unified approach to the applications of Petri...

The general understanding of design is that it should lead to a manufacturable product. Neither the design nor the process of manufacturing is perfect. As a result, the product will be faulty, will require testing and fixing. Where does economics enter this scenario?
Consider the cost of testing and fixing the product. If a manufactured product is grossly faulty, or too many of the products are faulty, the cost of testing and fixing will be high. Suppose we do not like that. We then ask what is the cause of the faulty product. There must be something wrong in...

Purpose of the Book This book presents an approach to improve the standard object-oriented pro gramming model. The proposal is aimed at supporting a larger range of incre mental behavior variations and thus promises to be more effective in mastering the complexity of today's software. The ability of dealing with the evolutionary nature of software is one of main merits of object-oriented data abstraction and inheritance. Object-orientation allows to organize software in a structured way by separating the description of different kinds of an abstract data type into different classes and...

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the most prominent and successful example of pattern recognition to date. There are thousands of research papers and dozens of OCR products. Optical Character Rcognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier offers a perspective on the performance of current OCR systems by illustrating and explaining actual OCR errors. The pictures and analysis provide insight into the strengths and weaknesses of current OCR systems, and a road map to future progress.
Optical Character Recognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier...

Scheduling in Parallel Computing Systems: Fuzzy and Annealing Techniques advocates the viability of using fuzzy and annealing methods in solving scheduling problems for parallel computing systems. The book proposes new techniques for both static and dynamic scheduling, using emerging paradigms that are inspired by natural phenomena such as fuzzy logic, mean-field annealing, and simulated annealing. Systems that are designed using such techniques are often referred to in the literature as intelligent' because of their capability to adapt to sudden changes in their...

Dependable Network Computing provides insights into various problems facing millions of global users resulting from the internet revolution'. It covers real-time problems involving software, servers, and large-scale storage systems with adaptive fault-tolerant routing and dynamic reconfiguration techniques. Also included is material on routing protocols, QoS, and dead- and live-lock free related issues. All chapters are written by leading specialists in their respective fields.
Dependable Network Computing provides useful information for scientists, researchers, and...

As any history student will tell you, all events must be understood within their political and sociological context. Yet science provides an interesting counterpoint to this idea, since scientific ideas stand on their own merit, and require no reference to the time and place of their conception beyond perhaps a simple citation. Even so, the historical context of a scientific discovery casts a special light on that discovery - a light that motivates the work and explains its significance against a backdrop of related ideas. The book that you hold in your hands is unusually adept at presenting...

Physics-Based Deformable Models presents a systematic physics-based framework for modeling rigid, articulated, and deformable objects, their interactions with the physical world, and the estimate of their shape and motion from visual data. This book presents a large variety of methods and associated experiments in computer vision, graphics and medical imaging that help the reader better to understand the presented material. In addition, special emphasis has been given to the development of techniques with interactive or close to real-time performance.
Physics-Based...

Rule-Based Programming is a broad presentation of the rule-based programming method with many example programs showing the strengths of the rule-based approach. The rule-based approach has been used extensively in the development of artificial intelligence systems, such as expert systems and machine learning. This rule-based programming technique has been applied in such diverse fields as medical diagnostic systems, insurance and banking systems, as well as automated design and configuration systems.
Rule-based programming is also helpful in bridging the semantic gap between an...