Energy and environmental issues have caused a marked increase in electricity production from renewable energy sources since the beginning of the 21st Century. The concept of sustainable development and concern for future generations challenge us every day to produce new technologies for energy production, and new patterns of use for these...

Iwhat has happened in that time. We have seen the transformation of the Web from a small experiment to a World Wide phenomenon. We have seen the emergence of voice over IP and peer-to-peer content sharing. We have seen technology speed up a hundred-fold, the emergence of broadband to the home, and the rise of botnets and other horrid...

The "one-size-fits-all" thinking regarding traditional RDBMSs has been challenged in the last few years by the emergence of diversified NoSQL databases. More than 120 NoSQL databases are now available in the market, and the market leader by far is MongoDB. With so many companies opting for MongoDB as their NoSQL database of choice,...

The next several years will see a massive emergence of hydrogen fuel cells as an alterative energy option in both transportation and domestic use. The long-range expectation is that hydrogen will be used as a fuel, produced either from renewable energy, fossil, or nuclear sources, offering an environmentally acceptable and efficient source of...

The emergence of key second-generation Web services standards has positioned service-oriented architecture (SOA) as the foremost platform for contemporary business automation solutions. The integration of SOA...

The IT community has always struggled with questions concerning the value of an organization’s investment in software and hardware. It is the goal of value-based software engineering (VBSE) to develop models and measures of value which are of use for managers, developers and users as they make tradeoff decisions between, for example,...

Both the editors of this book were exposed to human-in-the-loop simulations while pursuing their doctoral degrees in the Center for Human-Machine Systems at Georgia Tech. In fact, S. Narayanan served as Ling Rothrock’s teaching assistant for the simulation course taught by Prof. Christine Mitchell. It has been over 15 years...

This book is about how to model software systems and how to use those models. It is rooted in that emerging intellectual "ecosystem" comprising the various networks (the Internet, intranets, extranets, and so on), distributed objects, piecemeal development based on short development cycles, and something called...