The Conference on Traffic and Granular Flow brings together international researchers from different fields ranging from physics to computer science and engineering to discuss the latest developments in traffic-related systems. Originally conceived to facilitate new ideas by considering the similarities of traffic and granular flow, TGF'15, organised by Delft University of Technology, now covers a broad range of topics related to driven particle and transport systems. Besides the classical topics of granular flow and highway traffic, its scope includes data transport (Internet traffic), pedestrian and evacuation dynamics, intercellular transport, swarm behaviour and the collective dynamics of other biological systems. Recent advances in modelling, computer simulation and phenomenology are presented, and prospects for applications, for example to traffic control, are discussed. The conference explores the interrelations between the above-mentioned fields and offers the opportunity to stimulate interdisciplinary research, exchange ideas, and meet many experts in these areas of research.

Scientific workflows have emerged as a key technology that assists scientists with the design, management, execution, sharing and reuse of in silico experiments. Workflow management systems simplify the management of scientific workflows by providing graphical interfaces for their development, monitoring and analysis. Nowadays, e-Science combines such workflow management systems with large-scale data and computing resources into complex research infrastructures. For instance, e-Science allows the conveyance of best practice research in collaborations by providing workflow repositories, which facilitate the sharing and reuse of scientific workflows. However, scientists are still faced with different limitations while reusing workflows. One of the most common challenges they meet is the need to select appropriate applications and their individual execution parameters. If scientists do not want to rely on default or experience-based parameters, the best-effort option is to test different workflow set-ups using either trial and error approaches or parameter sweeps. Both methods may be inefficient or time consuming respectively, especially when tuning a large number of parameters. Therefore, scientists require an effective and efficient mechanism that automatically tests different workflow set-ups in an intelligent way and will help them to improve their scientific results. This thesis addresses the limitation described above by defining and implementing an approach for the optimization of scientific workflows. In the course of this work, scientists’ needs are investigated and requirements are formulated resulting in an appropriate optimization concept. In a following step, this concept is prototypically implemented by extending a workflow management system with an optimization framework, including general mechanisms required to conduct workflow optimization. As optimization is an ongoing research topic, different algorithms are provided by pluggable extensions (plugins) that can be loosely coupled with the framework, resulting in a generic and quickly extendable system. In this thesis, an exemplary plugin is introduced which applies a Genetic Algorithm for parameter optimization. In order to accelerate and therefore make workflow optimization feasible at all, e-Science infrastructures are utilized for the parallel execution of scientific workflows. This is empowered by additional extensions enabling the execution of applications and workflows on distributed computing resources. The actual implementation and therewith the general approach of workflow optimization is experimentally verified by four use cases in the life science domain. All workflows were significantly improved, which demonstrates the advantage of the proposed workflow optimization. Finally, a new collaboration-based approach is introduced that harnesses optimization provenance to make optimization faster and more robust in the future.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2016, held in Fez, Morocco, in September 2014. The 45 full papers and 4 invited talks presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. This volume contains invited contributions and accepted papers from the main track and from the three organized workshops. The first part is organized according to three topics: (1) Cellular Automata Theory and Implementation (2) Cellular Automata Dynamics and Synchronization, (3) Asynchronous Cellular Automata and Asynchronous Discrete Models - ACA. The second part of the volume contains three topics: (4) Modelling and Sim-ulation with Cellular Automata (5) Crowds, Traffic and Cellular Automata –CT&CA (6) Agent-Based Simulation and Cellular Automata – ABS&CA.

This two-volume-set (LNCS 7203 and 7204) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, PPAM 2011, held in Torun, Poland, in September 2011. The 130 revised full papers presented in both volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address issues such as parallel/distributed architectures and mobile computing; numerical algorithms and parallel numerics; parallel non-numerical algorithms; tools and environments for parallel/distributed/grid computing; applications of parallel/distributed computing; applied mathematics, neural networks and evolutionary computing; history of computing.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, ICEIS 2016, held in Rome, Italy, in April 2016. The 23 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 257 submissions to ICEIS 2016. The volume also contains one invited talk in full paper length. The papers selected to be included in this book contribute to the understanding of relevant trends of current research on enterprise information systems, including issues with regard to enterprise engineering, heterogeneous systems, security, software engineering, systems integration, business process management, human factors and affective computing, ubiquitous computing, social computing, knowledge management, and artificial intelligence.

This book continues the biannual series of conference proceedings, which has become a classical reference resource in traffic and granular research alike. It addresses new developments at the interface between physics, engineering and computational science. Complex systems, where many simple agents, be they vehicles or particles, give rise to surprising and fascinating phenomena. The contributions collected in these proceedings cover several research fields, all of which deal with transport. Topics include highway, pedestrian and internet traffic, granular matter, biological transport, transport networks, data acquisition, data analysis and technological applications. Different perspectives, i.e. modeling, simulations, experiments and phenomenological observations, are considered.