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Multibody System Dynamics -     

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Microsystem Technologies -     

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The vision of ''Internet as a computer'' motivates many technical trends, like pervasive computing, grid computing, service computing and recently, cloud computing, as well as some business trends, like modern service industry, digital economy and smarter planet. These evolutionary changes demand that the software systems which are running on the open and dynamic Internet have to be autonomous, context-sensitive, continuous-reactive, evolutionary, and proactive, and the software entities dispersed on distributed nodes over the Internet will be turned into self-contained, autonomous and adaptive. Thus, like the information Web, i.e. the World Wide Web, these Internet-based software entities will constitute a software Web. That gives birth a new software paradigm. A portmanteau term ''Internetware'' is used to denote the future software-web. An Internetware system will be able to perceive the changes of the open and dynamic environment, respond to the changes, and exhibit the context-aware, adaptive and trustworthy behaviors. The mission of Internetware may challenge many aspects of software technologies, from the operating platforms and the programming models to the engineering approaches. Internetware 2010, the second Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware, aims to provide an interactive forum where researchers and professionals from multiple disciplines and domains meet and exchange ideas to explore and address the challenges brought by Internetware. The symposium was held at Suzhou, China, during the 2-4 of Nov, 2010. Thirty three papers were submitted and each of them was reviewed by at least two members of an International Program Committee. Among them, 12 have been accepted (which means an acceptance rate of 36%) for their quality as well as for their interesting terms of discussions for the symposium attendees. This special issue contains 7 revised and substantially extended papers from the 12 based on presentations at the symposium: ......     

Preface

Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence -     

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Networked sensing and control has attracted significant interest in recent years due to its wide applications. For example, sensor networks, especially wireless sensor networks, have found important applications in environmental monitoring, agriculture, building and industrial automation, machine condition monitoring, intelligent transportation systems, health care, surveillance, and defense. On the other hand, due to the flexibility and significant cost-saving, there has been an increasing trend for control systems to utilize digital communication networks for exchanging information between sensor and controller and/or controller and actuator, as well as between subsystems or systems sharing the same communication networks. Furthermore, networked multiagent systems, where the collective behavior of a system is realized through interactions among dynamically decoupled systems, have also been the focus of many recent research efforts. In networked systems, the network is an important component with constraints and uncertainties, such as the limited bandwidth, random transmission-delays, possible packet-losses, out-of-sequence measurements, etc. The uncertainties and constraints become more significant in wireless networks because of its limited resources of communication and computation, and the fading that changes the throughput of communication channels. As a result, there is an imperative need of new tools for analysis and synthesis, and new algorithms for control, estimation and decision-making, to take these uncertainties and constraints into consideration and handle the interplay among communication, computation and control. In the past few years, a lot of research efforts have been devoted to this field and significant advancement has been made. This special issue intends to reflect part of those achievements. Indeed, the special issue consists of 17 papers among which 8 discuss the control over communication networks, 1 investigates the traffic control in communication networks, 3 are concerned with multiagent systems, and 5 deal with wireless sensor networks. All papers were selected from numerous submissions and carefully reviewed.We hope that the special issue will promote the research interest in networked sensing, actuation and control systems, and foster new applications of networked systems. Special issue editors: Lihua Xie, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Frank L. Lewis, The University of Texas at Arlington, USA.