Search results for ""ISTE Ltd and John Wiley Sons Inc""

The rapid development of new technologies in the industry of the future implies a major evolution in the industrial safety measures needed to be met, such as societal requirements. Towards Process Safety 4.0 in the Factory of the Future presents the concept of Safety 4.0 from the point of view of process safety, occupational safety and health, as well as systems’ cyber security. Numerous examples illustrate the different approaches of the identified methods and techniques of Safety 4.0. Their concepts, paradigms, structural bases, couplings, complexities and flaws are systematically analyzed. This comprehensive approach to Safety 4.0 is aimed at the wide variety of actors working in the industry of the future.

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Elastic waves are used in fields as diverse as the non-destructive evaluation of materials, medicine, seismology and telecommunications. Elastic Waves in Solids 1 presents the different modes of propagation of elastic waves in increasingly complex media and structures. It first studies the propagation in an unlimited solid where only the material properties are taken into account. It then analyzes reflection and transmission phenomena at an interface with a fluid or a second solid.It explains the search for propagation modes on a free surface or at the interface between two media. Finally, it proposes a study of the dispersive propagation of elastic waves guided by a plate or a cylinder. This book is intended for students completing a master’s degree in acoustics, mechanics, geophysics or engineering, as well as teachers and researchers in these disciplines.

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In the automotive and aerospace industries, the need for strong yet light materials has given rise to extensive research into aluminum and magnesium alloys and formable titanium alloys. All of these are categorized as light weight materials. The distinguishing feature of light weight materials is that they are low density, but they have a wide range of properties and, as a result, a wide range of applications. This book provides researchers and students with an overview of the recent advancements in light weight material processing, manufacturing and characterization. It contains chapters by eminent researchers on topics associated with light weight materials, including on the current buzzword “composite materials”. First, this book describes the current status of light weight materials. Then, it studies applications of these materials, given that, as the densities vary, so do the applications, ranging from automobiles and aviation to bio-mechatronics. This book will therefore serve as an excellent guide to this field.

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The extent of digitalization and the use of digital tools no longer need to be demonstrated. While companies have been integrating the challenges of such a transformation for more than 20 years, the public sector is lagging behind. Digital Transformation and Public Policies studies the mechanisms of the digital transformation of public organizations. It explores how this new deal, driven mainly by platforms, resonates with new public policies and how digital technology is redrawing the relationship between the governors and the governed. This book, the result of transdisciplinary collaboration between researchers, aims to answer these questions by focusing on several cases: public innovation policies, health data and social policies with fiscal microsimulation devices.

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This book offers an overview of the research carried out in didactics on the teaching and learning of science at university from the perspective of university pedagogy. The first part sheds light on the links between university pedagogy and didactics, by studying the nature and place of disciplinary pedagogical knowledge at university and the training of academics through the prism of professionalization. The second part questions the teaching practices of academics from a disciplinary approach, from the point of view of the impact of the research discipline on the declared practices, or that of the links between the resources mobilized in research and teaching activities. The third part proposes a sociological look at these practices, in terms of the analysis of the discourses of institutional actors or of practices in situ. The book concludes with a synthesis that develops the main issues, challenges and difficulties that remain at the end of this book.

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The spectacular reappearance of the aurora borealis at the beginning of the 18th century, often observed simultaneously from different observatories in Europe, mobilized and federated a large community of astronomers on a European scale. It encouraged them to communicate the results of their observations and, in compiling exhaustive catalogs of information, has helped to establish a system of the aurora borealis that can be further studied in the future, according to the experimental method inherited from the previous century. This book is dedicated to some of the main aurora observers in Europe and to the human, institutional and philosophical context in which they evolved in the first half of the 18th century. Its reading should be seen as a retrospective journey through the scholarly world of the Enlightenment, during which the same scholars are frequently encountered and reencountered, yet each time in different contexts, or from different angles, with the aim of compiling an account of the swarming of ideas and encounters that constituted the development of experimental science in this pivotal period.

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Digitalization of Work brings together researchers and international experts whose work and practices are based on a variety of disciplines such as work and organizational psychology, social psychology, ergonomics, communication and information sciences, and management sciences. This book closely examines the challenges associated with recent or emerging ways of working related to the digitalization of work. It acts as a directory of contributions that enrich recent thought and approaches to the deployment and accompaniment of the ways in which work is organized, including practices and environments likely to gain relevance in coming years (remote working and management, coworking for salaried employees, flexible office spaces, working from home and nomadism).

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Today, hundreds of millions of people drink contaminated water without knowing it. Yet water treatment technologies can effectively eliminate contamination and can supply urban and rural populations with safe drinking water in a secure way. For almost two centuries, the huge number of treatments available to guarantee water quality has grown alongside technological progress, the strengthening of industry norms and the reinforcement of consumer expectations. New treatment methods have been developed according to the advancement of knowledge and new sanitary regulations. This five-volume book sets out to clearly present the variety of treatments available along with their performance, limitations and conditions of use as well as ways to combine them to produce safe drinking water, which is a basic need essential to everyday life. The author shares his expertise acquired at Veolia, a company that is a world leader in water services and sanitation, desalination of sea water and the recycling of wastewater. Founded in France in 1853 to bring safe water to populations and to protect them from waterborne epidemics which ravaged cities, its history is intertwined with that of water treatment.

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Today, hundreds of millions of people drink contaminated water without knowing it. Yet water treatment technologies can effectively eliminate contamination and can supply urban and rural populations with safe drinking water in a secure way.For almost two centuries, the huge number of treatments available to guarantee water quality has grown alongside technological progress, the strengthening of industry norms and the reinforcement of consumer expectations. New treatment methods have been developed according to the advancement of knowledge and new sanitary regulations.This five-volume book sets out to clearly present the variety of treatments available along with their performance, limitations and conditions of use as well as ways to combine them to produce safe drinking water, which is a basic need essential to everyday life.The author shares his expertise acquired at Veolia, a company that is a world leader in water services and sanitation, desalination of sea water and the recycling of wastewater. Founded in France in 1853 to bring safe water to populations and to protect them from waterborne epidemics which ravaged cities, its history is intertwined with that of water treatment.

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Geotechnical engineering is now a fundamental component of construction projects. The third volume of this book is its backbone, dedicated to foundations for civil and industrial construction projects. Applied Geotechnics for Construction Projects 3 first presents the basic theoretical principles and rules governing the designing and validation of foundations; shallow, semi-deep and deep, then presents real foundation projects with a detailed comparison of the approaches and methods of calculating foundations in relation to the reference systems and rules in force, closely compared to and validated by the Eurocodes. The third chapter presents examples of foundation projects, covering high-side building rafts, strip footings, piles and embankments, enriched by an unprecedented level of experience in the field of foundations for civil and industrial construction projects. It ends with examples of damage to foundations and practical appendices. Each chapter of this third volume is illustrated with photographs and measurements of construction sites and is built on both theory and experience in the field of foundations as a whole. The result is a combination of geotechnical expertise and lessons learned from experience, both of which are highly valuable in the field of applied geotechnics for construction projects.

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Systems and Uses of Digital Sciences for Knowledge Organization is a large-scale scientific work that brings together researchers and R&D professionals to discuss ideas and actions in the organization of knowledge. The main objective of this book is to define collaborative strategies, use advanced technologies in multiple research fields and outline applications of knowledge organization and its cultural, education, economic and industrial potential.The organization of knowledge and advanced technologies (OCTA) asks the following questions: How can we strengthen alliances between multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary studies? How can we broaden our skills surrounding common objects of study? How can we innovate the solutions found and propose sustainable development to society confidently? This book is a result of intensive and collaborative work between highly respected scientific authors. The nine chapters that have been selected for this book have been peer-reviewed by the OCTA program committee, both as written submissions and when presented during the OCTA multi-conference on organization.

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The Universe is made up of systems consisting of a very large number of particles interacting in a very complex way. When studying these systems, a precise microscopic approach is unattainable. In practice, the best strategy is one that is able to “distinguish” between superfluous information and the information needed to make predictions about the evolution of the system. There are two main competing approaches: kinetic and hydrodynamic. Collective Phenomena in Plasmas and Elsewhere presents an overview of the theoretical bases of these kinetic and hydrodynamic approaches, but also discusses their limitations, the links between them and their extension to quantum mechanics and relativity. These methods were born in part out of the study of plasmas, but they also have more universal applications. A general framework for these approaches is outlined, followed by some applications in plasmas, gravitation, Bose–Einstein condensates and dark matter. Particular emphasis is placed on the analogies that can be made between all these different systems.

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For a long time, favelas were a source of fear for tourists visiting Rio de Janeiro. Now that they are more appealing, some have become popular tourist destinations even though they are still regarded as an "off the beaten track" activity. Favela Tours analyzes the factors behind the emergence of tourism in the favelas, places of otherness and authenticity for visitors who come mainly from Western Europe and North America. Based on ethnography of those involved in these practices (guides, residents and tourists), this book describes how the local and global forces are converging to make favelas part of the western tourism system: a mechanism for fabricating and assimilating otherness.

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Decision and Decision-maker in an Industrial Environment developed around the observation that two different decision-makers, faced with the same problem, may not make the same decision. The book proposes explanations for this, ranging from the wholly rational to the irrational, and analyzes different factors in decision-making, such as the intention of the decision-maker, the environment in which their decision is made or the process leading to decision-making. While the common belief is that everything in an industrial environment stems from reasoned decisions, analysis of common practice shows that this is not always the case. This book offers an original perspective by presenting the decision making mechanism from the point of view of the decision maker and their handling of a specific decision-making problem. To learn more about the decision-maker’s motivations when faced with these situations, the authors provide a review of the history of decisionmaking and the major trends in decision-making theory. The concepts and methods are presented with illustrations based on the use of an MES, an industrial management software package.

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At the heart of the globalization of trade and of economies, estuarine cities are at the forefront of accelerating global change. They must confront the tensions generated by their demographic and socio-economic attractions and their ecological vulnerability linked to their location in trade flows, downstream of rivers and at the interface between land and sea. Using the examples of the estuarine cities of the Gironde, the Loire and the Seine and their specific challenges, such as climate change, flood risk, biodiversity, port flows and urban planning, this book analyzes their emerging trajectories guided by proactive governance of global change.

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The articulation between persistence and change is relevant to a great number of different disciplines. It is particularly central to the study of urban and rural forms in many different fields of research, in geography, archaeology, architecture and history. Resilience puts forward the idea that we can no longer be truly satisfied with the common approaches used to study the dynamics of landscapes, such as the palimpsest approach, the regressive method and the semiological analysis amongst others, because they are based on the separation between the past and the present, which itself stems from the differentiation between nature and society. This book combines spatio-temporalities, as described in archeogeography, with concepts that have been developed in the field of ecological resilience, such as panarchy and the adaptive cycle. Thus revived, the morphological analysis in this work considers landscapes as complex resilient adaptive systems. The permanence observed in landscapes is no longer presented as the endurance of inherited forms, but as the result of a dynamic that is fed by this constant dialogue between persistence and change. Thus, resilience is here decisively on the side of dynamics rather than that of resistance.

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The key social issues of health, medicine, the environment, food and safety cannot be addressed without the support of chemical sensors and biosensors, whose performance is constantly improving in terms of reliability and cost, particularly in the production of autonomous devices connected to the Internet. Obtaining high-intensity transduction signals arising from the interaction of an analyte and a sensor, enabling the identification and dosage of a given compound, requires the selection of suitable physical measurement methods and the creation of structures that react specifically to different types of analyte. Nanotechnologies and Nanomaterials Applied to Chemical Sensors and Biosensors details recent advances in the field of sensor design using carbon-based nanomaterials (graphene, carbon nanotubes, carbon quantum dots, etc.) and inorganic nanomaterials (metallic nanoparticles, nanocrystals, transition metal dichalcogenides, etc.), as well as a variety of ph

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As a result of its widespread implementation in economic and social structures, the network concept appears to be a paradigm of the contemporary world. The need for various services – transport, energy, consumption of manufacturing goods, provision of care, information and communication, etc. – draws users into interwoven networks which are meshes of material and immaterial flows. In this context, the user is a consumer of goods and services from industries and administrations, or they themselves are part of the organization (digital social networks).This book examines the invariants that unify networks in their diversity, as well as the specificities that differentiate them. It provides a reading grid that distinguishes a generic level where these systems find a common interpretation, and a specific level where appropriate analytical methods are used. Three case studies from different fields are presented to illustrate the purpose of the book in detail.

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This book presents the foundations of nuclear physics, covering several themes that range from subatomic particles to stars. Also described in this book are experimental facts relating to the discovery of the electron, positron, proton, neutron and neutrino. The general properties of nuclei and the various nuclear de-excitation processes based on the nucleon layer model are studied in greater depth. This book addresses the conservation laws of angular momentum and parity, the multipolar transition probabilities E and M, gamma de-excitation, internal conversion and nucleon emission de-excitation processes. The fundamental properties of α and β disintegrations, electron capture, radioactive filiations, and Bateman equations are also examined. Nuclear Physics 1 is intended for high school physics teachers, students, research teachers and science historians specializing in nuclear physics.

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NG-RAN and 5G-NR describes the deployment of 5G NSA (non standalone 5G) and 5G-SA (standalone 5G). 5G-NSA deals with radio access entities. For the 5G-NSA mode, dual MR DC connectivity is based on radio measurements, allowing the master 4G base station MeNB to add or remove a secondary 5G node SgNB.This book describes the architecture of the NG radio access network and the 5G-NR radio interface according to the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) specifications. The overall architecture of the NG-RAN, including the NG, Xn and F1 interfaces and their interaction with the radio interface, are also described. The 5G-NR physical layer is mainly connected by implementing antennas, which improves transmission capacity. 5G-SA deals with the 5G Core network.In the 5G-SA model, the mobile is attached to the 5G Core network through NG-RAN. The book explains radio procedure, from switching on a device to establishing a data connection, and how this connection is maintained even if mobility is involved for both 5G-SA and 5G-NSA deployment. NG-RAN and 5G-NR is devoted to the radio access network, but mobile registration, establishment procedures and re-establishment procedures are also explained.

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Pertinent to modern industry, administration, finance and society, the most pressing issue for firms today is how to reapproach the way we think and work in business. With topics ranging from improving productivity and coaxing economic growth after periods of market inactivity, Complex Decision-Making in Economy and Finance offers pragmatic solutions for dealing with the critical levels of disorder and chaos that have developed throughout the modern age. This book examines how to design complex products and systems, the benefits of collective intelligence and self-organization, and the best methods for handling risks in problematic environments. It also analyzes crises and how to manage them. This book is of benefit to companies and public bodies with regards to saving assets, reviving fortunes and laying the groundwork for robust, sustainable societal dividends. Examples, case studies, practical hints and guidelines illustrate the topics, particularly in finance.

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How to manage the cybersecurity of industrial systems is a crucial question. To implement relevant solutions, the industrial manager must have a clear understanding of IT systems, of communication networks and of control-command systems. They must also have some knowledge of the methods used by attackers, of the standards and regulations involved and of the available security solutions. Cybersecurity of Industrial Systems presents these different subjects in order to give an in-depth overview and to help the reader manage the cybersecurity of their installation. The book addresses these issues for both classic SCADA architecture systems and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems.

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The notion of otherness, often misused, requires important conceptualization work in order for it to be considered in all of its forms, and not simply reduced to the account of others. Although otherness certainly questions the link to the other (relation), it also questions the link to the self (reflexivity) and the link to knowledge (epistemology). Being tridimensional, the process of otherness is a paradox, the meaning of which can only be drawn thanks to ethics, psychoanalytical orientation and the history of philosophical ideas. This book, which relates to philosophy of education, seeks to explain the problematic notion of otherness, the desire for which is specific to humankind. It examines how otherness questions the limits of knowledge, transmission and language, and argues that it is in fact a value, a tool and practice for all the actors involved in the relationship between education, knowledge and care.

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This book will present a complete modeling of the human psychic system that allows to generate the thoughts in a strictly organizational approach that mixes a rising and falling approach. The model will present the architecture of the psychic system that can generate sensations and thoughts, showing how one can feel thoughts. The model developed into an organizational architecture based on massive multiagent systems. The architecture will be fully developed, showing how an artificial system can be endowed with consciousness and intentionally generate thoughts and, especially, feel them. These results are multidisciplinary, combining both psychology and computer science disciplines.

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Due to their special properties, organic semiconductors enable the development of large-area, low-cost devices, paving the way for flexible and nomadic applications that advantageously replace those made with traditional semiconductors. This book describes the properties and deposition methods of organic semiconductors, transparent conductive materials or metals which are used in the fabrication of organic devices. The physical processes (optical, electrical and interface) that control the mechanisms in the formation and transport of the charge carriers of the materials are studied and explained in detail. Organic Electronics 1 introduces the fundamental and applied aspects of the field of organic electronics. It is intended for researchers and students in university programs or engineering schools specializing in electronics, energy and materials.

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Technological changes have often produced important social changes that translate into spatial and planning practice. Whereas the intelligent city is one of the unavoidable and even dominant concepts, digital uses can influence urban planning in four different directions. These scenarios are represented by a compass composed of a horizontal axis opposing institutional and non-institutional actors, and a second axis with open and closed opposition.

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Additive manufacturing, which was first invented in France and then applied in the United States, is now 33 years old and represents a market of around 5 billion euros per year, with annual growth of between 20 and 30%. Today, additive manufacturing is experiencing a great amount of innovation in its processes, software, engineering and materials used. Its strength as a process has more recently allowed for the exploration of new niches, ranging from applications at nanometer and decameter scales, to others in mechanics and health. As a result, the limitations of the process have also begun to emerge, which include the quality of the tools, their cost of manufacture, the multi-material aspects, functionalities and surface conditions. Volume 2 of this series presents the current techniques, improvements and limits of additive manufacturing, providing an up-to-date review of this process.

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This book aims to provide an efficient methodology of solving a fluid mechanics problem, based on an awareness of the physical. It meets different objectives of the student, the future engineer or scientist: Simple sizing calculations are required to master today's numerical approach for solving complex practical problems.

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The aim of this book is the study of signals and deterministic systems, linear, time-invariant, finite dimensions and causal. A set of useful tools is selected for the automatic and signal processing and methods of representation of dynamic linear systems are exposed, and analysis of their behavior. Finally we discuss the estimation, identification and synthesis of control laws for the purpose of stabilization and regulation. The study of signal characteristics and properties systems and knowledge of mathematical tools and treatment methods and analysis, are lately more and more importance and continue to evolve. The reason is that the current state of technology, particularly electronics and computing, enables the production of very advanced processing systems, effective and less expensive despite the complexity.

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The book gathers the major issues involved in the practical design of Power Management solutions in wireless products as Internet-of-things. Presentation is not about state-of-the-art but about appropriation of validated recent technologies by practicing engineers. The book delivers insights on major trade-offs and a presentation of examples as a cookbook. The content is segmented in chapters to make access easier for the lay-person.

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In presenting the concepts and the logical structure of the reasoning offered by game theory and their applications, the book explains the rational process of decision making in the framework of firm management and market competition. The book will expose both general teachings and a comprehensive analysis applied to specific case studies of various sectors of the economy.

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This book is the second of a set dedicated to the mathematical tools used in partial differential equations derived from physics. It presents the properties of continuous functions, which are useful for solving partial differential equations, and, more particularly, for constructing distributions valued in a Neumann space. The author examines partial derivatives, the construction of primitives, integration and the weighting of value functions in a Neumann space. Many of them are new generalizations of classical properties for values in a Banach space. Simple methods, semi-norms, sequential properties and others are discussed, making these tools accessible to the greatest number of students – doctoral students, postgraduate students – engineers and researchers, without restricting or generalizing the results.

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This book is the first of a set dedicated to the mathematical tools used in partial differential equations derived from physics. Its focus is on normed or semi-normed vector spaces, including the spaces of Banach, Fréchet and Hilbert, with new developments on Neumann spaces, but also on extractable spaces. The author presents the main properties of these spaces, which are useful for the construction of Lebesgue and Sobolev distributions with real or vector values and for solving partial differential equations. Differential calculus is also extended to semi-normed spaces. Simple methods, semi-norms, sequential properties and others are discussed, making these tools accessible to the greatest number of students – doctoral students, postgraduate students – engineers and researchers without restricting or generalizing the results.

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Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a mathematical framework for modeling sequential decision problems under uncertainty as well as reinforcement learning problems. Written by experts in the field, this book provides a global view of current research using MDPs in artificial intelligence. It starts with an introductory presentation of the fundamental aspects of MDPs (planning in MDPs, reinforcement learning, partially observable MDPs, Markov games and the use of non-classical criteria). It then presents more advanced research trends in the field and gives some concrete examples using illustrative real life applications.

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This book features four workshops from the INTEROP-ESA international conference, organized by the INTEROP NoE (Interoperability Research for Networked Enterprises Applications and Software Network of Excellence). It highlights key topics related to interoperability of enterprise applications and software. The workshops are related to the conference topics and will enable researchers to explore new research ideas for the future.

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This title presents the general principles of instrumentation processes. It explains the theoretical analysis of physical phenomena used by standard sensors and transducers to transform a physical value into an electrical signal. The pre-processing of these signals through electronic circuits – amplification, signal filtering and analog-to-digital conversion – is then detailed, in order to provide useful basic information. Attention is then given to general complex systems. Topics covered include instrumentation and measurement chains, sensor modeling, digital signal processing and diagnostic methods and the concept of smart sensors, as well as microsystem design and applications. Numerous industrial examples punctuate the discussion, setting the subjects covered in the book in their practical context.

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From the characterization of materials to accelerated life testing, experimentation with solids and structures is present in all stages of the design of mechanical devices. Sometimes only an experimental model can bring the necessary elements for understanding, the physics under study just being too complex for an efficient numerical model. This book presents the classical tools in the experimental approach to mechanical engineering, as well as the methods that have revolutionized the field over the past 20 years: photomechanics, signal processing, statistical data analysis, design of experiments, uncertainty analysis, etc. Experimental Mechanics of Solids and Structures also replaces mechanical testing in a larger context: firstly, that of the experimental model, with its own hypotheses; then that of the knowledge acquisition process, which is structured and robust; finally, that of a reliable analysis of the results obtained, in a context where uncertainty could be important.

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This book is the first of a series which focuses on the interpolation and extrapolation of optimal designs, an area with significant applications in engineering, physics, chemistry and most experimental fields. In this volume, the authors emphasize the importance of problems associated with the construction of design. After a brief introduction on how the theory of optimal designs meets the theory of the uniform approximation of functions, the authors introduce the basic elements to design planning and link the statistical theory of optimal design and the theory of the uniform approximation of functions. The appendices provide the reader with material to accompany the proofs discussed throughout the book.

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Petri Nets were defined for the study of discrete events systems and later extended for many purposes including dependability assessment. In our knowledge, no book deals specifically with the use of different type of PN to dependability. We propose in addition to bring a focus on the adequacy of Petri net types to the study of various problems related to dependability such as risk analysis and probabilistic assessment. In the first part, the basic models of PN and some useful extensions are briefly recalled. In the second part, the PN are used as a formal model to describe the evolution process of critical system in the frame of an ontological approach. The third part focuses on the stochastic Petri Nets (SPN) and their use in dependability assessment. Different formal models of SPN are formally presented (semantics, evolution rules…) and their equivalence with the corresponding class of Markov processes to get an analytical assessment of dependability. Simplification methods are proposed in order to reduce the size of analytical model and to make it more calculable. The introduction of some concepts specific to high level PN allows too the consideration of complex systems. Few applications in the field of the instrumentation and control (l&C) systems, safety integrated systems (SIS) emphasize the benefits of SPN for dependability assessment.

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The omnipresence of electronic devices in our everyday lives has been accompanied by the downscaling of chip feature sizes and the ever increasing complexity of digital circuits. This book is devoted to the analysis and design of digital circuits, where the signal can assume only two possible logic levels. It deals with the basic principles and concepts of digital electronics. It addresses all aspects of combinational logic and provides a detailed understanding of logic gates that are the basic components in the implementation of circuits used to perform functions and operations of Boolean algebra. Combinational logic circuits are characterized by outputs that depend only on the actual input values. Efficient techniques to derive logic equations are proposed together with methods of analysis and synthesis of combinational logic circuits. Each chapter is well structured and is supplemented by a selection of solved exercises covering logic design practices.

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This book deals with the management and valuation of energy storage in electric power grids, highlighting the interest of storage systems in grid applications and developing management methodologies based on artificial intelligence tools. The authors highlight the importance of storing electrical energy, in the context of sustainable development, in "smart cities" and "smart transportation", and discuss multiple services that storing electrical energy can bring. Methodological tools are provided to build an energy management system storage following a generic approach. These tools are based on causal formalisms, artificial intelligence and explicit optimization techniques and are presented throughout the book in connection with concrete case studies.

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In an increasingly interconnected world, "Communication Networks Economy" provides the rational understanding necessary to provide universal access to communication means in an efficient way. This book presents the principal elements of the economics of a network as it stands today, taking into account experiences of technicians in the field. The author gives a simplified picture of the current situation in terms of structures and architecture of a network, bearing in mind the necessary quality of service and the profitability of investments, accompanied by references to recent economic works. An overview is given on the general themes of regulation and tariff principles, and the relations between supply and demand, from the perspectives of professional and residential users and network operators. Different aspects of the present situations of networks and the incidence of the Internet on the economy are also presented. In conclusion, the reader will obtain an overview of the most significant issues likely to influence the economics of communications networks as they are today.

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Gas hydrates, or clathrate hydrates, are crystalline solids resembling ice, in which small (guest) molecules, typically gases, are trapped inside cavities formed by hydrogen-bonded water (host) molecules. They form and remain stable under low temperatures – often well below ambient conditions – and high pressures ranging from a few bar to hundreds of bar, depending on the guest molecule. Their presence is ubiquitous on Earth, in deep-marine sediments and in permafrost regions, as well as in outer space, on planets or comets. In addition to water, they can be synthesized with organic species as host molecules, resulting in milder stability conditions: these are referred to as semi-clathrate hydrates. Clathrate and semi-clathrate hydrates are being considered for applications as diverse as gas storage and separation, cold storage and transport and water treatment. This book is the first of two edited volumes, with chapters on the experimental and modeling tools used for characterizing and predicting the unique molecular, thermodynamic and kinetic properties of gas hydrates (Volume 1) and on gas hydrates in their natural environment and for potential industrial applications (Volume 2).

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This book is a general presentation of complex systems, examined from the point of view of management. There is no standard formula to govern such systems, nor to effectively understand and respond to them. The interdisciplinary theory of self-organization is teeming with examples of living systems that can reorganize at a higher level of complexity when confronted with an external challenge of a certain magnitude. Modern businesses, considered as complex systems, ideally know how to flexibly and resiliently adapt to their environment, and also how to prepare for change via self-organization. Understanding sources of potential crisis is essential for leaders, though not all crises are necessarily bad news, as creative firms know how to respond to challenges through innovation: new products and markets, organizational learning for collective intelligence, and more.

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This book is dedicated to the general study of fluid structure interaction with consideration of uncertainties. The fluid-structure interaction is the study of the behavior of a solid in contact with a fluid, the response can be strongly affected by the action of the fluid. These phenomena are common and are sometimes the cause of the operation of certain systems, or otherwise manifest malfunction. The vibrations affect the integrity of structures and must be predicted to prevent accelerated wear of the system by material fatigue or even its destruction when the vibrations exceed a certain threshold.

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The idea of autonomous systems that are able to make choices according to properties which allow them to experience, apprehend and assess their environment is becoming a reality. These systems are capable of auto-configuration and self-organization. This book presents a model for the creation of autonomous systems based on a complex substratum, made up of multiple electronic components that deploy a variety of specific features. This substratum consists of multi-agent systems which act continuously and autonomously to collect information from the environment which they then feed into the global system, allowing it to generate discerning and concrete representations of its surroundings. These systems are able to construct a so-called artificial corporeity which allows them to have a sense of self, to then behave autonomously, in a way reminiscent of living organisms.

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