The manned mission is seen as a first step towards a Mars surface exploration base-station and, later, establishing permanent settlement. The location and use of Mars’s natural resources is vital to enable cost-effective long-duration human exploration and exploitation missions as well as subsequent human colonization. Planet resources...

Soft computing, as a collection of techniques exploiting approximation and tolerance for imprecision and uncertainty in traditionally intractable problems, has become very effective and popular especially because of the synergy derived from its components. The integration of constituent technologies provides complementary methods that allow...

This book describes the factory planning process with its manifold practical characteristics. Previous planning approaches only emanate from the product model. Future plannings need to allow for dissimilarity of an individual factory more strongly, i.e., the factory will feature even more individual characteristics according to its position...

Telephone, telefax, email and internet - the key ingredient of the inner workings is the conduit: the line which is designed to carry massive amounts of data at breakneck speed. In their data-carrying capacity optical fiber lines beat other technologies (copper cable, microwave beacons, satellite links) hands down, at least in the long...

Current radiation protection standards are based upon the application of the linear no-threshold (LNT) assumption, which considers that even very low doses of ionizing radiation can cause cancer. The radiation hormesis hypothesis, by contrast, proposes that low-dose ionizing radiation is beneficial. In this book, the author examines all facets...

This volume contains revised versions of selected papers presented at the biennial meeting of the Classification and Data Analysis Group (CLADAG) of the Italian Statistical Society, which was held in Macerata, September 12–14, 2007. Carlo Lauro chaired the Scientific Programme Committee and Francesco Palumbo chaired the Local...

In 2009, for the second time in a row, Jena hosted an extraordinary event. In 2008, Jena celebrated the 450th birthday of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena with the motto “Lichtgedanken” – “flashes of brilliance.” This year, for almost one week, Jena became the center for the pattern recognition research...

This book focuses on chemical and nanophotonic technology to be used to develop novel nano-optical devices and systems. It begins with temperature- and photo-induced phase transition of ferromagnetic materials. Further topics include: energy transfer in artificial photosynthesis, homoepitaxial multiple quantum wells in ZnO, near-field...

A matroid is an abstract mathematical structure that captures combinatorial properties of matrices. This book offers a unique introduction to matroid theory, emphasizing motivations from matrix theory and applications to systems analysis.
This book serves also as a comprehensive presentation of the theory and application of mixed...

The geometry of lines occurs naturally in such different areas as sculptured surface machining, computation of offsets and medial axes, surface reconstruction for reverse engineering, geometrical optics, kinematics and motion design, and modeling of developable surfaces. This book covers line geometry from various viewpoints and aims towards...

"Brain-inspired information technology" is one of key concepts for the development of information technology in the next generation. Explosive progress of computer technology has been continuing based on a simple principle called "if-then rule". This means that the programmer of software have to direct every action of the...