Special section: Smart water systems

The purpose of this Special Section is to provide an account of the state-of-the-art and perspectives for future research in the design and analysis of monitoring and control methods for smart water systems. This paper provides an overview of the six articles in the special section. Specifically, the special section consists of four review articles, as well as one vision and one tutorial article. These articles provide a review of leakage detection and isolation, a review of contamination event diagnosis, a review of state- space modelling of multiple reacting species in drinking water systems, a review of the application of model predictive control in Water Systems, a vision of optimizing pressure management and self-cleaning, as well as a tutorial for leakage detection and mitigation of potential contamination risk.     

Special section on testing and security of Web systems

This special section is devoted to a selection of papers that have been originally published in the Proceedings of the International Workshop on Web Quality, Verification and Validation (WQVV) held in Como, Italy, in July 2007. The workshop was part of the Seventh International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2007). These papers investigate different issues of two fundamental “aspects” of quality and dependability of modern Web systems: testing and security. The main contribution of this special section consists in trying to bring the gap between research and “industrial” practice in Web systems. The use of new technologies, tools and methodologies is increasing in the Web and it makes the systems more and more interactive and responsive than in the past. Therefore, limits and problems related to specific aspects of systems quality and dependability are investigated, and new approaches and ideas are proposed to overcome such limitations.     

Special section on machine intelligence approaches to systems biology

The three papers in this special section focus on machine intelligence approaches to systems biology.