This edited volume provides comprehensive and latest information on the fungal biodiversity in its morphological characters, bioactive molecules, pathogenicity and virulence, and its impacts on crop production and sustainable management of agricultural productivity towards resolving global food security issues. The increasing number of infectious fungal diseases are regarded as threats to agricultural productivity and global food security. The efforts done by scientists to inventories the fungal diversity and identification of fungal species contributing as pathogens towards many plant and human diseases have been compiled in the present volume. The identification of the potential fungal pathogens is a prerequisite for an effective disease control management program. Also important is to understand the complex interactions between the host-pathogen and the environment. The book dwells on insights on the aforementioned aspects. The book also includes articles on ecological significance of fungi and fungal antagonists used as biocontrol agents on other pathogens. This compilation is useful to scientists working in similar areas as well as to undergraduate and graduate students keen on getting updated information on the subject. Scientists involved in agricultural research, crop management, and industries that manufacture agrochemicals may also find it useful read.

This handbook deals with the vast subject of thermal management of engines and vehicles by applying the state of the art research to diesel and natural gas engines. The contributions from global experts focus on management, generation, and retention of heat in after-treatment and exhaust systems for light-off of NOx, PM, and PN catalysts during cold start and city cycles as well as operation at ultralow temperatures. This book will be of great interest to those in academia and industry involved in the design and development of advanced diesel and CNG engines satisfying the current and future emission standards.

The volume set LNAI 11740 until LNAI 11745 constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications, ICIRA 2019, held in Shenyang, China, in August 2019.

This handbook deals with the vast subject of thermal management of engines and vehicles by applying the state of the art research to diesel and natural gas engines. The contributions from global experts focus on management, generation, and retention of heat in after-treatment and exhaust systems for light-off of NOx, PM, and PN catalysts during cold start and city cycles as well as operation at ultralow temperatures. This book will be of great interest to those in academia and industry involved in the design and development of advanced diesel and CNG engines satisfying the current and future emission standards.

Exploring the celestial expanse of optimization and its transformative applications, our featured reprint comprises a compilation that delves into the heart of optimization, unraveling the convergence of theory and practice across various domains.

Wearable exoskeletons are electro-mechanical systems designed to assist, augment, or enhance motion and mobility in a variety of human motion applications and scenarios. The applications, ranging from providing power supplementation to assist the wearers to situations where human motion is resisted for exercising applications, cover a wide range of domains such as medical devices for patient rehabilitation training recovering from trauma, movement aids for disabled persons, personal care robots for providing daily living assistance, and reduction of physical burden in industrial and military applications. The development of effective and affordable wearable exoskeletons poses several design, control and modelling challenges to researchers and manufacturers. Novel technologies are therefore being developed in adaptive motion controllers, human-robot interaction control, biological sensors and actuators, materials and structures, etc. In this book, the authors report recent advances and technology breakthroughs in exoskeleton developments. It will be of interest to engineers and researchers in academia and industry as well as manufacturing companies interested in developing new markets in wearable exoskeleton robotics.

This book includes a selection of 30 reviewed and enhanced manuscripts published during the 15th SpaceOps Conference held in May 2018 in Marseille, France. The selection was driven by their quality and relevance to the space operations community.

Combinatorial (or discrete) optimization is one of the most active fields in the interface of operations research, computer science, and applied math­ ematics. Combinatorial optimization problems arise in various applications, including communications network design, VLSI design, machine vision, air­ line crew scheduling, corporate planning, computer-aided design and man­ ufacturing, database query design, cellular telephone frequency assignment, constraint directed reasoning, and computational biology. Furthermore, combinatorial optimization problems occur in many diverse areas such as linear and integer programming, graph theory, artificial intelligence, and number theory.

As artificial intelligence (AI) is applied to more complex problems and a wider set of applications, the ability to take advantage of the computational power of distributed and parallel hardware architectures and to match these architec­ tures with the inherent distributed aspects of applications (spatial, functional, or temporal) has become an important research issue. Out of these research concerns, an AI subdiscipline called distributed problem solving has emerged. Distributed problem-solving systems are broadly defined as loosely-coupled, distributed networks of semi-autonomous problem-solving agents that perform sophisticated problem solving and cooperatively interact to solve problems. N odes operate asynchronously and in parallel with limited internode commu­ nication. Limited internode communication stems from either inherent band­ width limitations of the communication medium or from the high computa­ tional cost of packaging and assimilating information to be sent and received among agents. Structuring network problem solving to deal with consequences oflimited communication-the lack of a global view and the possibility that the individual agents may not have all the information necessary to accurately and completely solve their subproblems-is one of the major focuses of distributed problem-solving research. It is this focus that also is one of the important dis­ tinguishing characteristics of distributed problem-solving research that sets it apart from previous research in AI.

Variational Inequalities and Frictional Contact Problems contains a carefully selected collection of results on elliptic and evolutionary quasi-variational inequalities including existence, uniqueness, regularity, dual formulations, numerical approximations and error estimates ones. By using a wide range of methods and arguments, the results are presented in a constructive way, with clarity and well justified proofs. This approach makes the subjects accessible to mathematicians and applied mathematicians. Moreover, this part of the book can be used as an excellent background for the investigation of more general classes of variational inequalities. The abstract variational inequalities considered in this book cover the variational formulations of many static and quasi-static contact problems. Based on these abstract results, in the last part of the book, certain static and quasi-static frictional contact problems in elasticity are studied in an almost exhaustive way.

A unified approach is proposed for applied mechanics and optimal control theory. The Hamilton system methodology in analytical mechanics is used for eigenvalue problems, vibration theory, gyroscopic systems, structural mechanics, wave-guide, LQ control, Kalman filter, robust control etc. All aspects are described in the same unified methodology. Numerical methods for all these problems are provided and given in meta-language, which can be implemented easily on the computer. Precise integration methods both for initial value problems and for two-point boundary value problems are proposed, which result in the numerical solutions of computer precision.

A complete reference to adaptive control of systems with nonsmooth industrial nonlinearities such as: backlash; dead-zones; component failure; friction; hysteresis; saturation; and time delays.

This book presents the most recent state-of-the-art algorithms on robust environmental perception and reliability control for intelligent vehicle systems. By integrating object detection, semantic segmentation, trajectory prediction, multi-object tracking, multi-sensor fusion, and reliability control in a systematic way, this book is aimed at guaranteeing that intelligent vehicles can run safely in complex road traffic scenes.

The volume set LNAI 11740 until LNAI 11745 constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications, ICIRA 2019, held in Shenyang, China, in August 2019.
The total of 378 full and 25 short papers presented in these proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 522 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections as follows: