Despite traffic circles, four-way stop signs, lights regulated by timers or sensors, and other methods, the management of urban intersections remains problematic. Consider that transportation systems have all the features of so-called complex systems: the great number of state and control variables, the presence of uncertainty and indeterminism, th

Bio-inspired computational algorithms are always hot research topics in artificial intelligence communities. Biology is a bewildering source of inspiration for the design of intelligent artifacts that are capable of efficient and autonomous operation in unknown and changing environments. It is difficult to resist the fascination of creating artifacts that display elements of lifelike intelligence, thus needing techniques for control, optimization, prediction, security, design, and so on. Bio-Inspired Computational Algorithms and Their Applications is a compendium that addresses this need. It integrates contrasting techniques of genetic algorithms, artificial immune systems, particle swarm optimization, and hybrid models to solve many real-world problems. The works presented in this book give insights into the creation of innovative improvements over algorithm performance, potential applications on various practical tasks, and combination of different techniques. The book provides a reference to researchers, practitioners, and students in both artificial intelligence and engineering communities, forming a foundation for the development of the field.

This book presents a class of novel optimal control methods and games schemes based on adaptive dynamic programming techniques. For systems with one control input, the ADP-based optimal control is designed for different objectives, while for systems with multi-players, the optimal control inputs are proposed based on games. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods, the book analyzes the properties of the adaptive dynamic programming methods, including convergence of the iterative value functions and the stability of the system under the iterative control laws. Further, to substantiate the mathematical analysis, it presents various application examples, which provide reference to real-world practices.

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is the best example of how studies aimed at understanding and modeling the behavior of ants and other social insects can provide inspiration for the development of computational algorithms for the solution of difficult mathematical problems. Introduced by Marco Dorigo in his PhD thesis (1992) and initially applied to the travelling salesman problem, the ACO field has experienced a tremendous growth, standing today as an important nature-inspired stochastic metaheuristic for hard optimization problems. This book presents state-of-the-art ACO methods and is divided into two parts: (I) Techniques, which includes parallel implementations, and (II) Applications, where recent contributions of ACO to diverse fields, such as traffic congestion and control, structural optimization, manufacturing, and genomics are presented.

This book discusses transport systems and the implementation of related public policy - a relevant topic with contemporary traffic congestion, environmental intrusion, transport safety, and budget issues. It is a resource for both experienced researchers and those new to the field.

Driving is a fact of life. We are all spending more and more time on the road, and traffic is an issue we face everyday. This book will make you think about it in a whole new light. We have always had a passion for cars and driving. Now Traffic offers us an exceptionally rich understanding of that passion. Vanderbilt explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our attempts to engineer safety and even identifies the most common mistakes drivers make in parking lots. Based on exhaustive research and interviews with driving experts and traffic officials around the globe, Traffic gets under the hood of the quotidian activity of driving to uncover the surprisingly complex web of physical, psychological and technical factors that explain how traffic works.

Traffic Theory describes and illustrates the key models of traffic flow and associated traffic phenomena such as conflicts in traffic, traffic generation and assignment, and traffic control. The use of these various models are explored both in terms of how they have improved traffic systems over the years and how better implementation of these models can accelerate the successful deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Furthermore, the book outlines opportunities for development of additional models needed for continued improvement of ITS. The book is intended as a textbook for a college Transportation Science curriculum, and as a reference book for researchers in Transportation Science. Dr. Gazis has concentrated in the book's presentation on the fundamental concepts and methods in the various areas of traffic theory.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the joint conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: ECML PKDD 2008, held in Antwerp, Belgium, in September 2008. The 100 papers presented in two volumes, together with 5 invited talks, were carefully reviewed and selected from 521 submissions. In addition to the regular papers the volume contains 14 abstracts of papers appearing in full version in the Machine Learning Journal and the Knowledge Discovery and Databases Journal of Springer. The conference intends to provide an international forum for the discussion of the latest high quality research results in all areas related to machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases. The topics addressed are application of machine learning and data mining methods to real-world problems, particularly exploratory research that describes novel learning and mining tasks and applications requiring non-standard techniques.

This book takes a look at fully automated, autonomous vehicles and discusses many open questions: How can autonomous vehicles be integrated into the current transportation system with diverse users and human drivers? Where do automated vehicles fall under current legal frameworks? What risks are associated with automation and how will society respond to these risks? How will the marketplace react to automated vehicles and what changes may be necessary for companies? Experts from Germany and the United States define key societal, engineering, and mobility issues related to the automation of vehicles. They discuss the decisions programmers of automated vehicles must make to enable vehicles to perceive their environment, interact with other road users, and choose actions that may have ethical consequences. The authors further identify expectations and concerns that will form the basis for individual and societal acceptance of autonomous driving. While the safety benefits of such vehicles are tremendous, the authors demonstrate that these benefits will only be achieved if vehicles have an appropriate safety concept at the heart of their design. Realizing the potential of automated vehicles to reorganize traffic and transform mobility of people and goods requires similar care in the design of vehicles and networks. By covering all of these topics, the book aims to provide a current, comprehensive, and scientifically sound treatment of the emerging field of “autonomous driving".

Specialists working in the areas of optimization, mathematical programming, or control theory will find this book invaluable for studying interior-point methods for linear and quadratic programming, polynomial-time methods for nonlinear convex programming, and efficient computational methods for control problems and variational inequalities. A background in linear algebra and mathematical programming is necessary to understand the book. The detailed proofs and lack of "numerical examples" might suggest that the book is of limited value to the reader interested in the practical aspects of convex optimization, but nothing could be further from the truth. An entire chapter is devoted to potential reduction methods precisely because of their great efficiency in practice.