The risk of explosion is inseparable from industrial activity, as we are often reminded by the news. In order to avoid an explosion, it is necessary to understand the phenomena surrounding it, and take the necessary preventive measures to protect society if it comes to the worst-case scenario. This book will detail these phenomena. The Mechanisms of Explosions presents theoretical aspects from a physicochemical point of view and proposes various methods adapted to each type of explosion, including ATEX explosions. The author shares his knowledge of the mechanisms of explosions, acquired during numerous investigations. These 27 case studies - detailing circumstances, mechanisms and the nature and intensity of explosive effects - were selected to cover all of the possible physical or chemical phenomena, substances and mechanisms, without limiting themselves to the most common situations. This book, packed full of information, is designed to benefit those who analyze and investigate explosions, particularly insurance and judicial experts, prevention engineers, security managers and trainers.
The emergence of a true systemic science - the systemic one - capable of rigorously addressing the many problems posed by the design and management of the evolution of modern complex systems is therefore urgently needed if wants to be able to provide satisfactory answers to the many profoundly systemic challenges that humanity will have to face at the dawn of the third millennium. This emergence is of course not easy because one can easily understand that the development of the systemic is mechanically confronted with all the classical disciplines which can all pretend to bring part of the explanations necessary to the understanding of a system and which do not naturally see a good eye a new discipline claim to encompass them in a holistic approach ... The book of Jacques Printz is therefore an extremely important contribution to this new emerging scientific and technical discipline: it is indeed first of all one of the very few "serious" works published in French and offering a good introduction to the systemic. It gives an extremely broad vision of this field, taking a thread given by the architecture of systems, in other words by the part of the systemic that is interested in the structure of systems and their design processes, which allows everyone to fully understand the issues and issues of the systemic. We can only encourage the reader to draw all the quintessence of the masterful work of Jacques Printz which mixes historical reminders explaining how the systemic emerged, introduction to key concepts of the systemic and practical examples to understand the nature and the scope of the ideas introduced.
The integration and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in African countries is increasingly observable in various sectors of activity (banking, education, trade, etc.) despite a digital divide still relevant. ICT has become a major sector of the recent growth of a new informal economy in African cities (Chéneau-Loquay, 2008). This question has been at the heart of various international meetings. An overall positive and even utopian momentum is generally heard about the contribution of digital technologies to the development of African states. The adoption or appropriation of digital technologies by Africans is presented in many speeches by politicians or institutions involved in the field of cooperation and international development as an important issue for the development of this continent. These different considerations give rise to reflections on the following themes. - Social Media and Public Space in Africa - Challenges of the digital economy in Africa - ICT and modernization of higher education in Africa
This book is the second of a set dedicated to the mathematical tools used in partial differential equations derived from physics. It presents the properties of continuous functions, which are useful for solving partial differential equations, and, more particularly, for constructing distributions valued in a Neumann space. The author examines partial derivatives, the construction of primitives, integration and the weighting of value functions in a Neumann space. Many of them are new generalizations of classical properties for values in a Banach space. Simple methods, semi-norms, sequential properties and others are discussed, making these tools accessible to the greatest number of students - doctoral students, postgraduate students - engineers and researchers, without restricting or generalizing the results.
The threats of emerging diseases have shaken certainties about health systems, the effectiveness of governance, lifestyles and the reality of national sovereignty.The Covid-19 Crisis analyzes the global issues related to the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus through investigations and reflections related to both the epidemic itself (epidemiology, computerized surveillance tools and vaccines) and to the societal issues it raises (work, innovation, religious practices, behaviors and societal models).This eclectic approach highlights scientific working methods that meet the requirements of health crises, as well as technical solutions and societal practices adapted to epidemic situations. It also presents feedback and testimonies.
This book aims to rehabilitate kinetic modeling in the domain of polymer ageing, where it has been almost abandoned by the research community. Kinetic modeling is a key step for lifetime prediction, a crucial problem in many industrial domains in which needs cannot be satisfied by the common empirical methods.
The book proposes a renewed approach of lifetime prediction in polymer oxidative ageing. This approach is based on kinetic models built from relatively simple mechanistic schemes but integrating physical processes (oxygen diffusion and stabilizer transport), and use property (for instance mechanical failure) changes. An important chapter is dedicated to radiation-induced oxidation and its most important applications: radiochemical ageing at low dose rates and photo-chemical ageing under solar radiation. There is also a chapter devoted to the problem of ageing under coupled oxidation and mechanical loading.
Microwave and radio frequency (RF) elements play an important role in communication systems, and, due to the proliferation of radar, satellite and mobile wireless systems, there is a need for the study of electromagnetism. Each of the nine chapters of this book provides a complete analysis and modeling of the microwave structure used for emission or reception technology, providing students with a set of approaches that can be used for current and future RF and microwave circuit designs. The authors emphasize the practical nature of the subject by summarizing the analysis steps and giving numerous examples of problems and exercises complete with solutions, making this book theoretical, but also experimental, with over 16 microwave problems. This approach has produced a coherent and practical treatment of the subject. The book has grown out of the authors' own teaching and, as such, has a unity of methodology and style. It provides basic knowledge of microwave and RF range and is intended for microwave engineers and for advanced graduate students.
This introductory book to the six volume series includes an introduction defining the critical zone for mankind that extends from tree canopy and the lower atmosphere to water table and unweathered rock. Soils play a crucial role through the functions and the services that they provide to mankind. The spatial and temporal variability of soils is represented by information systems whose importance, recent evolutions and increasingly performing applications in France and in the world must be underlined. The soil functions, discussed in this book, focus on the regulation of the water cycle, biophysicochemical cycles and the habitat role of biodiversity. The main services presented are those related to the provision of agricultural, fodder and forest products, energy, as well as materials and the role of soil as infrastructure support. They also include the different cultural dimensions of soils, their representations being often linked to myths and rites, as well as their values of environmental and archaeological records. Finally, the issue is raised of an off-ground world.
Recent developments in the fields of energy, transport and industrial engineering have led to the emergence of new types of structures and infrastructures subject to variable stresses, for which the usual methods for designing pile foundations are now inadequate. The recommendations presented in this book will help to partly fill this technical gap by proposing a methodological approach and calculation methods to take account of the effects of cyclic loads in the design of foundations on piles. These are based on both laboratory and full scale experiments, and on modeling carried out within the framework of the national SOLCYP project.
Credit risk is one of the most important contemporary problems for banks and insurance companies. Indeed, for banks, more than forty percent of the equities are necessary to cover this risk. Though this problem is studied by large rating agencies with substantial economic, social and financial tools, building stochastic models is nevertheless necessary to complete this descriptive orientation.
This book presents a complete presentation of such a category of models using homogeneous and non-homogeneous semi-Markov processes developed by the authors in several recent papers. This approach provides a good method of evaluating the default risk and the classical VaR indicators used for Solvency II and Basel III governance rules.
This book is the first to present a complete semi-Markov treatment of credit risk while also insisting on the practical use of the models presented here, including numerical aspects, so that this book is not only useful for scientific research but also to managers working in this field for banks, insurance companies, pension funds and other financial institutions.
Credit risk is one of the most important contemporary problems for banks and insurance companies. Indeed, for banks, more than forty percent of the equities are necessary to cover this risk. Though this problem is studied by large rating agencies with substantial economic, social and financial tools, building stochastic models is nevertheless necessary to complete this descriptive orientation.
This book presents a complete presentation of such a category of models using homogeneous and non-homogeneous semi-Markov processes developed by the authors in several recent papers. This approach provides a good method of evaluating the default risk and the classical VaR indicators used for Solvency II and Basel III governance rules.
This book is the first to present a complete semi-Markov treatment of credit risk while also insisting on the practical use of the models presented here, including numerical aspects, so that this book is not only useful for scientific research but also to managers working in this field for banks, insurance companies, pension funds and other financial institutions.
This book presents basic stochastic processes, stochastic calculus including Lévy processes on one hand, and Markov and Semi Markov models on the other. From the financial point of view, essential concepts such as the Black and Scholes model, VaR indicators, actuarial evaluation, market values, fair pricing play a central role and will be presented. The authors also present basic concepts so that this series is relatively self-contained for the main audience formed by actuaries and particularly with ERM (enterprise risk management) certificates, insurance risk managers, students in Master in mathematics or economics and people involved in Solvency II for insurance companies and in Basel II and III for banks.
This book introduces ALM in the context of banks and insurance companies. Although this strategy has a core of fundamental frameworks, models may vary between banks and insurance companies because of the different risks and goals involved. The authors compare and contrast these methodologies to draw parallels between the commonalities and divergences of these two services and thereby provide a deeper understanding of ALM in general.
This book will be a "must" for people who want good knowledge of big data concepts and their applications in the real world, particularly in the field of insurance. It will be useful to people working in finance and to masters students using big data tools. The authors present the bases of big data: data analysis methods, learning processes, application to insurance and position within the insurance market. Individual chapters a will be written by well-known authors in this field.
The design and development of dyes and chromophores have recently attracted much attention in various research fields such as materials, radiation curing, (laser) imaging, optics, medicine, microelectronics, nanotechnology, etc.. In this book, the recent research for the use of dyes and chromophores in polymer science is presented. The interaction of the visible light with the dyes or the selected chromophores is particularly important in different fields (e.g. for photovoltaic, display applications (LED ...), laser imaging or laser direct writing, green chemistry with sunlight induced photopolymerization etc ...). This book gives an overview of the dyes and chromophores for all the important fields.
Software radio ideally provides the opportunity to communicate with any radio communication standard by modifying only the software, without any modification to hardware components. However, taking into account the static behavior of current communications protocols, the spectrum efficiency optimization, and flexibility, the radio domain has become an important factor.
From this thinking appeared the cognitive radio paradigm. This evolution is today inescapable in the modern radio communication world. It provides an autonomous behavior to the equipment and therefore the adaptation of communication parameters to better match their needs.
This collective work provides engineers, researchers and radio designers with the necessary information from mathematical analysis and hardware architectures to design methodology and tools, running platforms and standardization in order to understand this new cognitive radio domain.
This book contains the proceedings of the international workshop "Designing and Building with Ultra-High Performance Fibre-Reinforced Concrete (UHPFRC): State of the Art and Development", organized by AFGC, the French Association for Civil Engineering and French branch of fib, in Marseille (France), November 17-18, 2009. This workshop was focused on the experience of a lot of recent UHPFRC realizations.
Through more than 50 papers, this book details the experience of many countries in UHPFRC construction and design, including projects from Japan, Germany, Australia, Austria, USA, Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada... and France. The projects are categorized as novel architectural solutions, new frontiers for bridges, new equipments and structural components, and extending the service life of structures. The last part presents major research results, durability and sustainability aspects, and the updated AFGC Recommendations on UHPFRC.
This book describes the potentialities of metaheuristics for solving production scheduling problems and the relationship between these two fields.
For the past several years, there has been an increasing interest in using metaheuristic methods to solve scheduling problems. The main reasons for this are that such problems are generally hard to solve to optimality, as well as the fact that metaheuristics provide very good solutions in a reasonable time. The first part of the book presents eight applications of metaheuristics for solving various mono-objective scheduling problems. The second part is itself split into two, the first section being devoted to five multi-objective problems to which metaheuristics are adapted, while the second tackles various transportation problems related to the organization of production systems.
Many real-world applications are presented by the authors, making this an invaluable resource for researchers and students in engineering, economics, mathematics and computer science. Contents 1. An Estimation of Distribution Algorithm for Solving Flow Shop Scheduling Problems with Sequence-dependent Family Setup Times, Mansour Eddaly, Bassem Jarboui, Radhouan Bouabda, Patrick Siarry and Abdelwaheb Rebaï.
2. Genetic Algorithms for Solving Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problems, Imed Kacem.
3. A Hybrid GRASP-Differential Evolution Algorithm for Solving Flow Shop Scheduling Problems with No-Wait Constraints, Hanen Akrout, Bassem Jarboui, Patrick Siarry and Abdelwaheb Rebaï.
4. A Comparison of Local Search Metaheuristics for a Hierarchical Flow Shop Optimization Problem with Time Lags, Emna Dhouib, Jacques Teghem, Daniel Tuyttens and Taïcir Loukil.
5. Neutrality in Flow Shop Scheduling Problems: Landscape Structure and Local Search, Marie-Eléonore Marmion.
6. Evolutionary Metaheuristic Based on Genetic Algorithm: Application to Hybrid Flow Shop Problem with Availability Constraints, Nadia Chaaben, Racem Mellouli and Faouzi Masmoudi.
7. Models and Methods in Graph Coloration for Various Production Problems, Nicolas Zufferey.
8. Mathematical Programming and Heuristics for Scheduling Problems with Early and Tardy Penalties, Mustapha Ratli, Rachid Benmansour, Rita Macedo, Saïd Hanafi, Christophe Wilbaut.
9. Metaheuristics for Biobjective Flow Shop Scheduling, Matthieu Basseur and Arnaud Liefooghe.
10. Pareto Solution Strategies for the Industrial Car Sequencing Problem, Caroline Gagné, Arnaud Zinflou and Marc Gravel.
11. Multi-Objective Metaheuristics for the Joint Scheduling of Production and Maintenance, Ali Berrichi and Farouk Yalaoui.
12. Optimization via a Genetic Algorithm Parametrizing the AHP Method for Multicriteria Workshop Scheduling, Fouzia Ounnar, Patrick Pujo and Afef Denguir.
13. A Multicriteria Genetic Algorithm for the Resource-constrained Task Scheduling Problem, Olfa Dridi, Saoussen Krichen and Adel Guitouni.
14. Metaheuristics for the Solution of Vehicle Routing Problems in a Dynamic Context, Tienté Hsu, Gilles Gonçalves and Rémy Dupas.
15. Combination of a Metaheuristic and a Simulation Model for the Scheduling of Resource-constrained Transport Activities, Virginie André, Nathalie Grangeon and Sylvie Norre.
16. Vehicle Routing Problems with Scheduling Constraints, Rahma Lahyani, Frédéric Semet and Benoît Trouillet.
17. Metaheuristics for Job Shop Scheduling with Transportation, Qiao Zhang, Hervé Manier, Marie-Ange Manier.
About the Authors Bassem Jarboui is Professor at the University of Sfax, Tunisia.
Patrick Siarry is Professor at the Laboratoire Images, Signaux et Systèmes Intelligents (LISSI), University of Paris-Est Créteil, France.
Jacques Teghem is Professor at the University of Mons, Belgium.
This book contains the proceedings of the international workshop "Designing and Building with Ultra-High Performance Fibre-Reinforced Concrete (UHPFRC): State of the Art and Development", organized by AFGC, the French Association for Civil Engineering and French branch of fib, in Marseille (France), November 17-18, 2009. This workshop was focused on the experience of a lot of recent UHPFRC realizations.
Through more than 50 papers, this book details the experience of many countries in UHPFRC construction and design, including projects from Japan, Germany, Australia, Austria, USA, Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada... and France. The projects are categorized as novel architectural solutions, new frontiers for bridges, new equipments and structural components, and extending the service life of structures. The last part presents major research results, durability and sustainability aspects, and the updated AFGC Recommendations on UHPFRC.
With the impact of the recent financial crises, more attention must be given to new models in finance rejecting "Black-Scholes-Samuelson" assumptions leading to what is called non-Gaussian finance. With the growing importance of Solvency II, Basel II and III regulatory rules for insurance companies and banks, value at risk (VaR) - one of the most popular risk indicator techniques plays a fundamental role in defining appropriate levels of equities. The aim of this book is to show how new VaR techniques can be built more appropriately for a crisis situation.
VaR methodology for non-Gaussian finance looks at the importance of VaR in standard international rules for banks and insurance companies; gives the first non-Gaussian extensions of VaR and applies several basic statistical theories to extend classical results of VaR techniques such as the NP approximation, the Cornish-Fisher approximation, extreme and a Pareto distribution. Several non-Gaussian models using Copula methodology, Lévy processes along with particular attention to models with jumps such as the Merton model are presented; as are the consideration of time homogeneous and non-homogeneous Markov and semi-Markov processes and for each of these models. Contents 1. Use of Value-at-Risk (VaR) Techniques for Solvency II, Basel II and III.
2. Classical Value-at-Risk (VaR) Methods.
3. VaR Extensions from Gaussian Finance to Non-Gaussian Finance.
4. New VaR Methods of Non-Gaussian Finance.
5. Non-Gaussian Finance: Semi-Markov Models.
The aim of this book is to promote interaction between engineering, finance and insurance, as these three domains have many models and methods of solution in common for solving real-life problems. The authors point out the strict inter-relations that exist among the diffusion models used in engineering, finance and insurance. In each of the three fields, the basic diffusion models are presented and their strong similarities are discussed. Analytical, numerical and Monte Carlo simulation methods are explained with a view to applying them to obtain the solutions to the different problems presented in the book. Advanced topics such as nonlinear problems, Lévy processes and semi-Markov models in interactions with the diffusion models are discussed, as well as possible future interactions among engineering, finance and insurance. Contents 1. Diffusion Phenomena and Models.
2. Probabilistic Models of Diffusion Processes.
3. Solving Partial Differential Equations of Second Order.
4. Problems in Finance.
5. Basic PDE in Finance.
6. Exotic and American Options Pricing Theory.
7. Hitting Times for Diffusion Processes and Stochastic Models in Insurance.
8. Numerical Methods.
9. Advanced Topics in Engineering: Nonlinear Models.
10. Lévy Processes.
11. Advanced Topics in Insurance: Copula Models and VaR Techniques.
12. Advanced Topics in Finance: Semi-Markov Models.
13. Monte Carlo Semi-Markov Simulation Methods.
This book deals with in-situ tests that are performed in geotechnics to identify and characterize the soil. These measurements are then used to size the Civil Engineering works This book is intended for engineers, students and geotechnical researchers. It provides useful information for use and optimal use of in-situ tests to achieve a better book adaptation of civil engineering on the ground
The advent of the euro was a revolution for the 340 million people who exchanged their former currencies - considered a fundamental element of national sovereignty - for this new single currency.
Encouraged by some who believe that its introduction gives more cohesion and strength to Europe in an increasingly globalized economy, the euro is criticized by others who believe that the constraints it imposes are a source of austerity and favor northern European countries at the expense of countries in the south.
The Future of the Euro Currency traces the evolution of the monetary policy which the European Central Bank instituted at a time when economic, monetary and financial crises were legion. The book presents, as objectively as possible, the advantages and disadvantages of this new currency, while considering the improvements that could promote its durability.
This book is the first of a set dedicated to the mathematical tools used in partial differential equations derived from physics. Its focus is on normed or semi-normed vector spaces, including the spaces of Banach, Fréchet and Hilbert, with new developments on Neumann spaces, but also on extractable spaces. The author presents the main properties of these spaces, which are useful for the construction of Lebesgue and Sobolev distributions with real or vector values and for solving partial differential equations. Differential calculus is also extended to semi-normed spaces. Simple methods, semi-norms, sequential properties and others are discussed, making these tools accessible to the greatest number of students - doctoral students, postgraduate students - engineers and researchers without restricting or generalizing the results.
