Since the first part of the twentieth century, cybernetics and systems research have been developed as scientific disciplines. Investigations, launched in the area of cybernetics, previously dealt with control and information processing. In a more narrow sense, they consisted in the consideration of analogies of the control and the...

In the last decade, multi-agent systems have both become widely applied and also increasingly complex. The applications include the use of agents as automous decision makers in often safety-critical, dangerous, or high impact scenarios (traffic control, autonomous satellites, computational markets). The complexity arises from the fact...

Service-Oriented Architecture is becoming the leading architecture for IT, and it is changing the way organisations work. IT is slowly but steadily gaining maturity, and becoming the flexible yet stable and reliable support for business it should be. At the same time, IT is regaining its potential to create real business innovation. SOA will...

To capture...

Many engineers encountering VHDL (very high speed integrated circuits hardware description language) for the first time can feel overwhelmed by it. This book bridges the gap between the VHDL language and the hardware that results from logic synthesis with...

Rapid Surgery is the sixth title in the new Rapid series and is the ideal companion for medical students and junior doctors, covering key facts in a simple and...

Health expectancies were developed to address the important question of whether or not we are exchanging longer life for poorer health - replacing quality by quantity.
Health expectancies extend the concept of life expectancy to morbidity and disability by providing a means of dividing life expectancy into life spent in various states...