Product Description
This volume presents carefully refereed versions of the best papers presented at the Workshop on Models and Languages for Coordination of Parallelism and Distribution, held during ECOOP '94 in Bologna, Italy in July 1994. Recently a new class of models and languages for distributed and parallel programming has evolved; all these models share a few basic concepts: simple features for data description and a small number of mechanisms for coordinating the work of agents in a distributed setting. This volume demonstrates that integrating such features with those known from concurrent object-oriented programming is very promising with regard to language support for distribution and software composition. ... Read more

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This book presents a coherent development of the emergingfield ofConcurrent Engineering, focusing specifically onmechanical system design and the basic disciplines thatcomprise the field. The book is divided into five mainparts. Basic concepts and methods for integration ofmultiple disciplines into an integrated product andmanufacturing process design environment are presented inPart 1. Technical aspects peculiar toautomotive, aerospace,and naval system design are then presented in Part 2,in thecontext of a Concurrent Engineering approach to mechanicalsystemdesign. The critically important contributingdisciplines of manufacturing, design sensitivity analysis,and design optimization are treated in Parts 3 and 4.Finally, in Part 5, the emerging field of virtualprototyping fordesign of operator machine systems isdeveloped.The contributions to the book are based on lecturespresented at the NATO Advanced Study Institute held in IowaCity in June 1992. Each part starts with a paper based on aninvited lecture and continues with papers based oncontributed presentations. ... Read more

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The ECOOP '91 Workshop on Object-Based Concurrent Computingwas organized toprovide a forum on concurrent, distributedand open-ended computing. Theemphasis was on conceptual,theoretical and formal aspects, as well aspractical aspectsand sound experience, since such a viewpoint wasdeemedindispensible to investigate and establish a basis forfuturedevelopment.This volume contains 12 papers selected from 25 presentedatthe workshop, together with a paper by J.A. Goguen, who wasan invited speaker at the workshop. The papers areclassified into fourcategories:Formal methods (1): three papers are concerned with theformal semantics of concurrent objects based on processcalculi.Formal methods (2): four papers are concerned with variousformal approaches to the semantics of concurrentprograms.Concurrent programming: three papers.Models: three papers areconcerned with models forconcurrent systems. ... Read more

Product Description
Concurrent systems abound in human experience but theirfully adequateconceptualization as yet eludes our most ablethinkers. The COSY (ConcurrentSystem) notation and theorywas developed in the last decade as one of anumber ofmathematical approaches for conceptualizing and analyzingconcurrent and reactive systems.The COSY approach extends theconventional notions ofgrammar and automaton from formal language andautomatatheory to collections of "synchronized" grammars andautomata, permitting system specification and analysis of"true" concurrency withoutreduction to non-determinism.COSY theory is developed to a great level ofdetail andconstitutes the first uniform and self-containedpresentationof all results about COSY published in thepast, as well as including manynew results.COSY theory is used to analyze a sufficient number oftypical problems involving concurrency, synchronizationandscheduling, to allow the reader to apply the techniquespresented tosimilar problems.The COSY model is also related to many alternative models ofconcurrency, particularly Petri Nets, CommunicatingSequential Processes and the Calculus of CommunicatingSystems. ... Read more

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This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP '95, held in Cassis near Marseille, France in September 1995. The 33 refereed full papers included were selected out of 108 submissions and constitute the main part of the book; in addition there is a 60-page documentation of the four invited papers and a section presenting industrial reports. Thus besides having a very strong research component, the volume will be attractive for practitioners. The papers are organized in sections on efficient constraint handling, constraint logic programming, concurrent constraint programming, computational logic, applications, and operations research. ... Read more

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This volume contains most of the papers presented at theworkshop onresearch directions in high-level parallelprogramming languages, held at Mont Saint-Michel, France, inJune 1991. The motivation for organizing this workshop camefrom the emergence of a new class of formalisms fordescribing parallel computations in the last few years.Linda,Unity, Gamma, and the Cham are the most significantrepresentatives of this new class. Formalisms of this familypromote simple but powerful language features for describingdata and programs. These proposals appeared indifferentcontexts and were applied in different domains, and the goalof the workshop was to review the status of this new fieldand compare experiences. The workshop was organized intofour main sessions:Unity, Linda, Gamma, and ParallelProgram Design. The corresponding parts ofthe volume areintroduced respectively by J. Misra, D. Gelernter, D.LeM tayer, and J.-P. Ban tre. ... Read more

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The authors present a systematic development of the concurrent object-oriented agent programming language Guarded Definite Clauses (GDC). In contrast to other languages used in agent programming, like Java, Telescript, and Agent-TCL, this language is derived from the artificial intelligence programming tradition and emphasizes AI applications. The first part of the book is devoted to the principled evolution of the paradigm GDC; during the course of this evolution, the reader can also learn a lot about the history and the dramatically changing fortune, booms, and busts, of AI. In the second part, the paradigm is evaluated for application in various fields including parallel distributed search, distributed constraint solving, meta-interpretation, partial evaluation, and robotics and multi-agent systems. The book is written for students and professionals in agent programming or in AI programming in general. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Classic 'Logic-based' AI programming book!
Ringwood and Huntbach were my professors in graduate school. They taught us a course titled Multi Agent Systems. Much of the areas covered in those lectures find their way in this superb account on AI programming.

The first few chapters are accessible to readers without a strong AI background. The material gets more involving as we go through the book.

Interestingly, the book develops the idea of 'agent-oriented' programming chronologically from the the days preceeding the Fifth generation project to present day multi-agent technologies.

I would highly recommend the book to all AI students, researchers and practitioners. ... Read more

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This publication contains papers on the recent advances in concurrent engineering research and applications. Concurrent Engineering (CE) is known as a strategic weapon to achieve industrial competitiveness by developing products better, cheaper and faster using multi-functional teamwork. With this book, the editors focus on developing new methodologies, techniques and tools based on Web technologies required to support the key objectives of CE. For several years, with different technologies of information diffusion and sharing provided by the Web, new opportunities have appeared to improve the concurrent engineering approach. This book brings together concurrent engineering with Web technology and applications. The Web is not merely an immense book where people can search, browse, and view information. It is also a vast database that can allow computers to do more useful work. By developing a Web that holds information for both human and machine processing, people solve problems that would otherwise be too tedious or complex to solve. This book is of interest to researchers, industrials and students interested in the recent advances in concurrent engineering research and applications.

IOS Press is an international science, technical and medical publisher of high-quality books for academics, scientists, and professionals in all fields.

Some of the areas we publish in:

-Biomedicine
-Oncology
-Artificial intelligence
-Databases and information systems
-Maritime engineering
-Nanotechnology
-Geoengineering
-All aspects of physics
-E-governance
-E-commerce
-The knowledge economy
-Urban studies
-Arms control
-Understanding and responding to terrorism
-Medical informatics
-Computer Sciences ... Read more

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Agent Technology, or Agent-Based Approaches, is a new paradigm for developing software applications. It has been hailed as 'the next significant breakthough in software development', and 'the new revolution in software' ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Very specialized
For those interested in the MAS area this is a very good material to get really deep into the subject....despite very well written and documented, I personally don't recommend it for beginners ... Read more

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Concurrent Aggregates addresses a key problem in programming languages for massively parallel machines: how to write programs that are both modular and highly concurrent. It describes a novel approach for managing program complexity, based on multi-access data abstractions and combining ideas from object-oriented and data-parallel approaches, that allows programmers to build modular programs without sacrificing concurrency. The concepts are developed and, using application kernels, evaluated for effectiveness and implementability. The programming language called Concurrent Aggregates incorporates innovative data abstraction tools that allow unlimited concurrency. Concurrent Aggregates surpasses existing data-parallel languages in its support for arbitrary concurrent abstractions, not simply arrays or sets, as well as its support for heterogeneous concurrency. By adapting a proven complexity management and code reuse technique, data abstraction, to massively parallel systems, Chien produces a language suited for high degrees of concurrency and modular programs. The data abstraction tools, aggregates, permit exploitation of both homogeneous data and heterogeneous concurrency (operations against a parallel abstraction) in uniform and efficient style. Aggregates can encapsulate arbitrary amounts of data and concurrency, thus limiting the complexity of Concurrent Aggregates programs. Concurrent Aggregates even supports efficient composition of concurrent data abstractions.Concurrent Aggregates is designed for machines of the future. Chien presents a vision of how to organize computations on massively parallel MIMD machines and program them in modular fashion while facilitating efficient execution by allowing tuning within each abstraction. His unique perspective as a designer of the processor, network, and operating systems for the J-Machine prototype results in a language design that reflects the costs of computation in future systems.Andrew Andai Chien is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Book (would be 5 stars, but its dated).
This is a fascinating book written by R.C. Holt at U-Toronoto about a toy operating system they wrote in the early 1980's at UT, in the concurrent euclid language.It tells you just about everything you need to know towrite your own computer operating system.In the early 1980's, you eitherbought this book, or you got yourself a bootleg copy of the annotated BellSystem UNIX kernel source code, to learn systems programming.

This bookcontains an awesome and intuitive introduction to synchronization - thebest intro ever written in ANY book.I used to lend this book to my weakerOS students (At University of British Columbia) that were having troubleunderstanding synchronization - until one of them stole the book.I HAD toget another copy because this is a GREAT book. ... Read more

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Concurrent Prolog brings together for the first time descriptions of the major concurrent logic programming languages proposed so far for future parallel computer systems. In particular, it describes the concurrent logic programming language Flat Concurrent Prolog, a comprehensive and radical approach to parallel computing that is based on a simple foundation.After surveying recent research in concurrent logic programming languages, these two volumes address all of the relevant aspects of constructing such a parallel computer system. They investigate how systems programming and the implementation of parallel algorithms can be carried out with this language; how advanced program development techniques can be applied; how to embed other high-level languages in it; and how to implement this language efficiently on sequential and parallel computers. The results of these investigations suggest that Flat Concurrent Prolog can serve as a general-purpose high-level machine language for parallel computers.Ehud Y. Shapiro is Senior Scientist, Department of Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science. Concurrent Prolog is included in his Logic Programming series. Much of the research describe in the book was stimulated by the Fifth Generation project and cross-fertilization between the authors and ICOT. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Pressing the Lean Advantage
Womack and Jones in 'Lean Thinking' state that each manufacturing organization consists of: An ordering system, A production System, and a Distribution system.
Womack and Jones go on to say, as part of a Lean Action Plan:" as soon as you have flow and pull...in the production System...it is time to go to work on the... Ordering System... pipeline to spur sales and increase market share." In other words - press the advantage.
Clausing's 'Total Quality Development' is about pressing the advantage that lean transformation provides to the organization.
Clausing defines 'total quality development' as "the modern way of developing new prducts that will be competitive in the global economy" and goes on to say 'Total Quality Development' "combines the best management, strategy, and teamwork resulting in greatly reduced new product development time, a reduction in new product development costs, and increased product variety that together result in increased customer satisfaction".
Fine - you say, but what exactly is 'Total Quality Development'?
It is the integration of concurrent engineering, quality function deployment (QFD), and Taguchi's quality engineering into a total product development process.
Clausing's stated objective in writing this book is "to transform product development to achieve competitiveness in the global economy"
This book takes my breath away. If you are asking yourself what is next after installing flow and pull for your product family this is it.
Relevance to the lean manager 9/10
Relevance to the lean practitioner8/10
Clarity/Organization8/10
Original Content9/10
... Read more

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This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed extended postproceedings of the Second International Mozart/OZ Conference, MOZ 2004, held in Charleroi, Belgium in October 2004. Besides the 23 papers taken from the workshop, 2 invited papers were especially written for presentation in this book.

The papers are organized in topical sections on language-based computer security, computer science education, software engineering, human-computer interfaces and the Web, distributed programming, grammars and natural language, constraint programming, and constraint applications.

Product Description
Volume IV begins with the Logic Programming group, all descended from John McCarthy's LISP of the late 1960s.The Volume begins with a few pages from the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual, a vital token of things to come and moves on to LISP's offspring: LISP, Scheme, Guile, and CLOS. Finally, Jamie Andrews provides a substantial essay on the most important Functional programming language, Prolog. The contributions are designed to enable the programmer to evaluate the languages and to understand the ways in which each works.* Bob Chassell on Emacs LISP,* Brian Harvey on Scheme,* Jim Blandy on Guile,* Jim Veitch on CLOS,* Jamie Andrews on Prolog.

• Unique leaders in the field of functional, concurrent and logic programming provide insightful information about the language that they helped to create
• A complete handbook covering the most widely used functional, concurrent and logic programming languages
• Comprehensive coverage of each language includes history, syntax, variables, tips and traps
• Unique introductory material enables professional programmers to evaluate whether a specific language is appropriate for his or her use

The volume wraps up with a longchapter on Prolog--a key logic programming language that is highlyexpressive and useful for knowledge systems and artificialintelligence development. Though knowledge-based applications stillmake up only a small portion of the overall programming landscape,there's little doubt that they will play an increasingly importantrole in the future. This volume chronicles the roots of the evolutionof knowledge-based applications. --Stephen Plain ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Fairly good overview
This book is the last of the HPL series and covers some of the morepopular logic and functional programming languages. It is however somewhat outdated, since some up-and-coming functional programming languages, such as Haskell, are only mentioned and not treated in detail.

The first chapter is a quick introduction to Lisp (2 pages) and is put into to set up the next chapter on Emacs Lisp. This chapter is written by R.J. Chassell, and gives a general overview of the main features of Emacs Lisp. The author does a good job of explaining the language, and how it fits into the functional programming paradigm. He uses an interesting diagrammatic representation, which he calls "chest of drawers" to explain how printed representations of Emacs Lisp are different from the internal representation in the computer. One can also see very clearly the lambda calculus origins of Lisp in this chapter. The definition of a function in Lisp clearly illustrates the effectiveness of functional programming in emulating the concept from mathematics. A function is thought of as a rule for computation that takes several arguments and returns a value. It can however have a "side effect" of changing the values of variables or the contents of data structures. It is this later pr

operty of a function in programming languages that can cause confusion to a mathematician-turned-programmer. Mathematicians are not accustomed to worrying about these side effects, only concerning themselves with the result of the function.But the author does give a good explanation as to the importance of side effects in building programs. He is also careful to explain the different types of functions in Lisp, namely defined, anonymous, and primitive ones. The later are built-in ones that are written in C and provide performance enhancement. In addition, macros are distinguished from functions in that they merely serve as translators from user expressions to expressions to be evaluated by the Lisp interpreter. The "fundamental" functions "car", "cdr", and "cons" are also explained in detail, as functions that create and operate on lists.

In chapter 3, the author Brian Harvey discusses the language Scheme, and he endeavors to illustrate the simplicity of Scheme as a programming language. Because of its simplicity, Scheme has been used as a teaching tool in courses on computer languages and general programming. The author shows how Scheme is related to Lisp, and most importantly, he emphasizes the composition of functions (recursion) as being the primary control mechanism in Scheme. He makes a good case for the use of functional programming as a methodology for obtaining clarity and economy of thought in writing programs. The ability of Scheme to perform garbage collection contributes greatly to Scheme's ease of use. For example, Scheme employs lists in preference to arrays, with lists being dynamically allocated data structures, and the elements of the list can themselves be lists. In addition, and also very important, is the capability of Scheme to implement untyped variables. Mixing data types is a very powerful capability when attempting to write programs that are written to study complicated ideas and constructions from pure mathematics. The author also outlines the ability of Scheme to do tail call elimination, emphasizing that Scheme is the first language in which to guarantee this as part of its language specification. Recursive calls can be expensive for performance, but this capability allows conventional "for" and "while" processing to take place. For the beginner to Scheme, or functional programming, the author gives a useful discussion on common programming problems at the end of the chapter.

In the next chapter, the author Jim Blandy gives an overview of Guile. I did not read this chapter so I will omit its review.

In chapter 5, Jim Vietch discusses Common Lisp Object System (CLOS), which is an attempt to make Common Lisp an object-oriented programming language. The author gives a good historical introduction to CLOS and outlines its main features. The author compares CLOS with C++ and Smalltalk at various places in the chapter, which is helpful to programmers who are familiar with these latter languages and want to learn about how to do OO-programming in a functional programming language. The author does a good job of explaining the metaobject protocol (MOP), which allows overriding of the standard CLOS semantics. The author is convincing in his arguments of how MOP can add clarity and efficiency in OO-programmming. In addition, an effective discussion, using various code examples, is given of the power of dependency tracking and lazy evaluation. For me personally, lazy evaluation has been the tour-de-force behind functional programming and one of its most powerful features. Towards the end of the chapter, the author gives a good overview of performance issues with CLOS and a few hints on how to improve it.

The last chapter of the book covers Prolog, and is written by James Andrews. From the standpoint of mathematical logic, Prolog is based on the theory of Horn clauses, instead of the lambda calculus. Thus it could be described as a logic programming language, and this is the characterization given by the author in this book. Commercial Prolog compilers are now available, but the use of Prolog has executed a sort of random walk since its invention in the early 1970s. The author discusses, objectively I think, the misconceptions and problems with the use of Prolog. The main properties of Prolog are summarized very well in the article, with rules and recursion being the main expressive and computational strategies employed in Prolog. A program in Prolog is a sequence of (Horn) clauses, and the author shows how a Prolog program is able to arrive at a conclusion (or output) based on the rules and facts given in the program, which is effectively a depth-first search algorithm. The author also gives a nice discussion on the advanced features of Prolog, including negation, cuts, and predicates.

not recommended
My first impressions about this handbook are not very favourable.

Although the first volume claims to be a handbook of object oriented languagesit does not cover object oriented languages of NiklausWirth's group, e.g. Oberon-2 or its commercial dialect Component Pascal.

Additionally to that, a descendant of Wirth's languages, Modula 3, isclaimed to be one=of the smallest OO-languages. Due to the ignorancegiven to Oberon-2, this is only true for the OO languages covered in thishandbook. In comparison to Oberon-2, Modula-3 is bloated (language reportsize is 60 pages vs 2E 20 pages).

The language family tree on the insidecovers do not give the correctdescendants/ancestors for some of thelanguages.

Scrolling through the second volume on imperative languagesreveals similar prob=lems: Pascal is only mentioned with its commercialdialect "Turbo Pascal", which -- at least in its lastincarnation-- is anOO-language and not imperative one, and shouldtherefore be covered in the first volume. It misses the ISO/ANSI standards(ISO 7185: Standard Pascal and IS10206: Extended Pascal). It misses tomention Modula-2 (as I recall from memory, since I didnot buy thebook).

Since - IMHO - a handbook should be some objective reference, the first two volumes do not meet my criteria for a handbook. ... Read more

Product Description
This doctoral thesis proposes and experimentally evaluates techniques for efficient implementation of languages designed for high availability concurrent systems. This experimental evaluation has been done while developing the High Performance Erlang (HiPE) system, a native code compiler for SPARC and x86. The two main goals of the HiPE system are to provide efficient execution of Erlang programs, and to provide a research vehicle for evaluating implementation techniques for concurrent functional programming languages. The focus of the thesis is the evaluation of two techniques that enable inter-process optimization through dynamic compilation. The first technique is a fast register allocator called linear scan, and the second is a memory architecture where processes share memory. ... Read more

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This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Operations Management, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper proposes a goal-programming modeling approach to address three-dimensional concurrent engineering (3D-CE) problems involving product, process and supply chain design. The model enables straightforward representation of the inter-relations among multiple objectives and analysis of tradeoffs among those that exhibit conflicts. The model is demonstrated through a discussion of integrality versus modularity in product and supply chain designs that is motivated by events that took place in the automotive industry over the last decade. A numerical example is used to illustrate the model and the paper concludes with possible extensions and guidelines for implementation. ... Read more