This book explores the relations between the EU and the BRICS in the areas of politics, economic development, trade and security. The contributions cover topics such as the position of the EU and BRICS in the global order and the EU as a "normative power," as well as the evolution, characteristics and institutionalization of BRICS and the roles of its member countries Brazil, Russia, India, Chi…
This book aims at illustrating strategies to account for uncertainty in complex systems described by computer simulations. When optimizing the performances of these systems, accounting or neglecting uncertainty may lead to completely different results; therefore, uncertainty management is a major issues in simulation-optimization. Because of its wide field of applications, simulation-optimiz…
This edited volume contains the selected papers presented at the scientific board meeting of the German Cluster of Excellence on “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries”, held in November 2014. The topical structure of the book is clustered in six sessions: Integrative Production Technology, Individualised Production, Virtual Production Systems, Integrated Technologies, …
This book is based on the 2014 Special Issue 124(3) of Climatic Change. It brings together 16 key papers presented at, or produced, subsequent to the 2010 (3rd) International Workshop on Uncertainty in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventories. The Workshop was jointly organized by the Lviv Polytechnic National University, Ukraine; the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences; and th…
This book introduces methods for uncertain multi-attribute decision making including uncertain multi-attribute group decision making and their applications to supply chain management, investment decision making, personnel assessment, redesigning products, maintenance services, military system efficiency evaluation. Multi-attribute decision making, also known as multi-objective decision making w…
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on E-Democracy, E-Democracy 2015, held in Athens, Greece, in December 2015. The 13 revised full papers presented together with 8 extended abstracts were carefully selected from 33 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on privacy in e-voting, e-polls and e-surveys; security and privacy in new c…
This book deals with a number of fundamental issues related to the practical implementation of ultrasonic NDT techniques in an industrial environment. The book discusses advanced academic research results and their application to industrial procedures. The text covers the choice and generation of the signals energizing the system to probe position optimization, from quality assessment evaluati…
This book focuses on increasing the energy-efficiency of electronic devices so that portable applications can have a longer stand-alone time on the same battery. The authors explain the energy-efficiency benefits that ultra-low-voltage circuits provide and provide answers to tackle the challenges which ultra-low-voltage operation poses. An innovative design methodology is presented, verified, a…
This book provides readers with a state-of-the-art description of techniques to be used for ultra-low-power (ULP) and ultra-low-cost (ULC), short-range wireless receivers. Readers will learn what is required to deploy these receivers in short-range wireless sensor networks, which are proliferating widely to serve the internet of things (IoT) for “smart cities.” The authors address key chall…
As the evidence for human-induced climate change becomes more obvious, so too does the realisation that it will harshly impact on the natural environment as well as on socio-economic systems. Addressing the unpredictability of multiple sources of global change makes the capacity of governance systems to deal with uncertainty and surprise essential. However, how all these complex processes act i…