This book presents expert descriptions of the successful application of operations research in both the private and the public sector, including in logistics, transportation, product design, production planning and scheduling, and areas of social interest. Each chapter is based on fruitful collaboration between researchers and companies, and company representatives are among the co-authors. The book derives from a 2017 call by the Italian Operations Research Society (AIRO) for information from members on their activities in promoting the use of quantitative techniques, and in particular operations research techniques, in society and industry. A booklet based on this call was issued for the annual AIRO conference, but it was felt that some of the content was of such interest that it deserved wider dissemination in more detailed form. This book is the outcome. It equips practitioners with solutions to real-life decision problems, offers researchers examples of the practical application of operations research methods, and provides Master’s and PhD students with suggestions for research development in various fields.

This edited book entertains a multitude of perspectives on crisis information management systems (CIMS)-based disaster response and recovery management. The use of information technology in disaster management has become the central means for collecting, vetting, and distributing information. It also serves as the backbone for coordination and collaboration between response and recovery units as well as resource management tool. This edited volume aims at covering the whole range of application and uses of CIMS in disaster response and recovery. It showcases coordination and collaboration mechanisms between government agencies, the involvement of non-governmental entities, lessons learned as well as lessons not learned, approaches to disaster resiliency in society, community engagement in disaster/catastrophe responses and recovery, and, particularly, the role of CIMS in response and recovery. Serving as a platform for showcasing recent academic discoveries as well as a knowledge source for practitioners, this volume will be of interest to researchers and practitioners interested in disaster response, public administration, emergency management, and information systems.

This double volume book set constitutes the refereed proceedings of 4th International Conference, AI-HCI 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference, HCI International 2023, which was held virtually in Copenhagen, Denmark in July 2023. The total of 1578 papers and 396 posters included in the HCII 2023 proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 7472 submissions. The first volume focuses on topics related to Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, explainability, transparency and trustworthiness, ethics and fairness, as well as AI-supported user experience design. The second volume focuses on topics related to AI for language, text, and speech-related tasks, human-AI collaboration, AI for decision-support and perception analysis, and innovations in AI-enabled systems.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Frontiers in Cyber Security, FCS 2020, held in Tianjin, China*, in November 2020. The 39 full papers along with the 10 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 143 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on: IoT security; artificial intelligence; blockchain; cyber-physical systems security; cryptography; database security; depth estimation; mobile security; network security; privacy; program analysis; quantum cryptography; steganography; web security. *The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Optimization and Learning, OLA 2021, held in Catania, Italy, in June 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. The 27 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers presented in the volume are organized in topical sections on ​synergies between optimization and learning; learning for optimization; machine learning and deep learning; transportation and logistics; optimization; applications of learning and optimization methods.

Machine learning and optimization techniques are revolutionizing our world. Other types of information technology have not progressed as rapidly in recent years, in terms of real impact. The aim of this book is to present some of the innovative techniques in the field of optimization and machine learning, and to demonstrate how to apply them in the fields of engineering. Optimization and Machine Learning presents modern advances in the selection, configuration and engineering of algorithms that rely on machine learning and optimization. The first part of the book is dedicated to applications where optimization plays a major role, and the second part describes and implements several applications that are mainly based on machine learning techniques. The methods addressed in these chapters are compared against their competitors, and their effectiveness in their chosen field of application is illustrated.

This book offers a comprehensive reference guide to operations research theory and applications in health care systems. It provides readers with all the necessary tools for solving health care problems. The respective chapters, written by prominent researchers, explain a wealth of both basic and advanced concepts of operations research for the management of operating rooms, intensive care units, supply chain, emergency medical service, human resources, lean health care, and procurement. To foster a better understanding, the chapters include relevant examples or case studies. Taken together, they form an excellent reference guide for researchers, lecturers and postgraduate students pursuing research on health care management problems. The book presents a dynamic snapshot on the field that is expected to stimulate new directions and stimulate new ideas and developments.

We are pleased to welcome readers to this issue of the Journal of Applied Operational Research (JAOR), Volume 4, Number 1. The journal reports on developments in all aspects of operational research, including the latest advances and applications. It is a primarily goal of the journal to focus on and publish practical case studies which illustrate real-life applications.

This book focuses on the utilization of biomass for energy applications and mainly covers the original research and studies related to thermochemical conversion, biological conversion and physical conversion. It contains a summary the current scientific knowledge in the field of biomass utilization, which is the first of its kind in the literature. Energy potentials and different principles of energy transformation from various renewable energy sources (bamboo, wood residue, straw, sorrel, hay, pines, sunflower stalks, hazelnut husks, quinoa, camelina, crambe, safflower, muscantus and municipal sewage sludge, among others) are described in detail in this book. Different types of pyrolysis or torrefaction processing, combustion, thermal degradation, mechanical properties affecting processing, pre-treatment or treatment processes, or other processes based on thermochemical methods are described as well. The integral part of this book is the bibliometric analysis of worldwide publication trends on biomass and bioenergy with respect to the research evolution with the possibility of predicting future scenarios and the participation of stakeholders in the sector.

In this book, internationally recognized experts in philosophy of science, computer science, and modeling and simulation are contributing to the discussion on how ontology, epistemology, and teleology will contribute to enable the next generation of intelligent modeling and simulation applications. It is well understood that a simulation can provide the technical means to display the behavior of a system over time, including following observed trends to predict future possible states, but how reliable and trustworthy are such predictions? The questions about what we can know (ontology), how we gain new knowledge (epistemology), and what we do with this knowledge (teleology) are therefore illuminated from these very different perspectives, as each experts uses a different facet to look at these challenges. The result of bringing these perspectives into one book is a challenging compendium that gives room for a spectrum of challenges: from general philosophy questions, such as can we use modeling and simulation and other computational means at all to discover new knowledge, down to computational methods to improve semantic interoperability between systems or methods addressing how to apply the recent insights of service oriented approaches to support distributed artificial intelligence. As such, this book has been compiled as an entry point to new domains for students, scholars, and practitioners and to raise the curiosity in them to learn more to fully address the topics of ontology, epistemology, and teleology from philosophical, computational, and conceptual viewpoints.