This SpringerBrief focuses on the use of egress models to assess the optimal strategy for total evacuation in high-rise buildings. It investigates occupant relocation and evacuation strategies involving the exit stairs, elevators, sky bridges and combinations thereof. Chapters review existing information on this topic and describe case study simulations of a multi-component exit strategy. This review provides the architectural design, regulatory and research communities with a thorough understanding of the current and emerging evacuation procedures and possible future options. A model case study simulates seven possible strategies for the total evacuation of two identical twin towers linked with two sky-bridges at different heights. The authors present the layout of the building and the available egress components including both vertical and horizontal egress components, namely stairs, occupant evacuation elevators (OEEs), service elevators, transfer floors and sky-bridges. The evacuation strategies employ a continuous spatial representation evacuation model (Pathfinder) and are cross-validated by a fine network model (STEPS). Assessment of Total Evacuation Systems for Tall Buildings is intended for practitioners as a tool for analyzing evacuation methods and efficient exit strategies. Researchers working in architecture and fire safety will also find the book valuable.

This book is the first single volume that brings together the topics of serious games, alternative realities, and play therapy. The focus is on the use of digital media for the therapeutic benefit and well-being of a wide range of people−spanning those with special needs to the elderly to entire urban neighborhoods. This book brings together these topics to demonstrate the increasing trans/inter/multi-disciplinary initiatives apparent today in science, medicine, and academic research−interdisciplinary initiative that are already profoundly impacting society.

Riding on the success of 3D cinema blockbusters and advances in stereoscopic display technology, 3D video applications have gathered momentum in recent years. 3D-TV System with Depth-Image-Based Rendering: Architectures, Techniques and Challenges surveys depth-image-based 3D-TV systems, which are expected to be put into applications in the near future. Depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) significantly enhances the 3D visual experience compared to stereoscopic systems currently in use. DIBR techniques make it possible to generate additional viewpoints using 3D warping techniques to adjust the perceived depth of stereoscopic videos and provide for auto-stereoscopic displays that do not require glasses for viewing the 3D image.

Bite-Sized Strategies to Supercharge Your Productivity and Reclaim Your Time

Naming is an integral building block within data networks and systems and is becoming ever more important as complex data-centric usage models emerge. Internet Naming and Discovery is timely in developing a unified model for studying the topic of naming and discovery. It details the architectural and economic tools needed for designing naming and discovery schemes within the broader context of internetwork architecture. Readers will find in this book a historic overview of the Internet and a comprehensive survey of the literature, followed by and an in-depth examination of naming and discovery. Specific topics covered include: • formal definitions of name, address, identifier, locator, binding, routing, discovery, mapping, and resolution; • a discussion of the properties of names and bindings, along with illustrative case studies; • taxonomy that helps in organizing the solution space, and more importantly in identifying new avenues for contributing to the field; • a general model for exploring the tradeoffs involved in designing discovery systems; • an illustrative design exercise for differentiated discovery services; • broad treatment of the main economic issues that arise in the context of discovery; and • a game-theoretic incentive model for route distribution (and discovery) in the context of path-vector routing protocols (mainly BGP). Internet Naming and Discovery will be of great value to readers, including graduate students, engineers and computer scientists, theoreticians and practitioners, seeking a training in advanced networking, or specializing in computer and communications networks.

As Moore’s law continues to unfold, two important trends have recently emerged. First, the growth of chip capacity is translated into a corresponding increase of number of cores. Second, the parallelization of the computation and 3D integration technologies lead to distributed memory architectures. This book describes recent research that addresses urgent challenges in many-core architectures and application mapping. It addresses the architectural design of many core chips, memory and data management, power management, design and programming methodologies. It also describes how new techniques have been applied in various industrial case studies.

Automate Everything: n8n, LLMs, OpenAI API, Deepseek, Ollama & RAG! Business & Private AI Agents; More than just ChatGPT

Mastering Vocabulary for Fluent Spoken English

Driven by the increasing demand for capacity and Quality of Service in wireless cellular networks and motivated by the distributed antenna system, the authors proposed a cooperative communication architecture—Group Cell architecture, which was initially brought forward in 2001. Years later, Coordinated Multiple-Point Transmission and Reception (CoMP) for LTE-Advanced was put forward in April 2008, as a tool to improve the coverage of cells having high data rates, the cell-edge throughput and/or to increase system throughput. This book mainly focuses on the Group Cell architecture with multi-cell generalized coordination, Contrast Analysis between Group Cell architecture and CoMP, Capacity Analysis, Slide Handover Strategy, Power Allocation schemes of Group Cell architecture to mitigate the inter-cell interference and maximize system capacity and the trial network implementation and performance evaluations of Group Cell architecture.

Securing Business Logic: Identifying, Exploiting, and Mitigating Vulnerabilities in Web Applications

This book is intended to give a general overview of reliability, faults, fault models, nanotechnology, nanodevices, fault-tolerant architectures and reliability evaluation techniques. Additionally, the book provides an in depth state-of-the-art research results and methods for fault tolerance as well as the methodology for designing fault-tolerant systems out of highly unreliable components.

Modern multimedia systems are becoming increasingly multiprocessor and heterogeneous to match the high performance and low power demands placed on them by the large number of applications. The concurrent execution of these applications causes interference and unpredictability in the performance of these systems. In Multimedia Multiprocessor Systems, an analysis mechanism is presented to accurately predict the performance of multiple applications executing concurrently. With high consumer demand the time-to-market has become significantly lower. To cope with the complexity in designing such systems, an automated design-flow is needed that can generate systems from a high-level architectural description such that they are not error-prone and consume less time. Such a design methodology is presented for multiple use-cases – combinations of active applications. A resource manager is also presented to manage the various resources in the system, and to achieve the goals of performance prediction, admission control and budget enforcement.

Accessing remote instrumentation worldwide is one of the goals of e-Science. The task of enabling the execution of complex experiments that involve the use of distributed scientific instruments must be supported by a number of different architectural domains, which inter-work in a coordinated fashion to provide the necessary functionality. These domains embrace the physical instruments, the communication network interconnecting the distributed systems, the service oriented abstractions and their middleware. The Grid paradigm (or, more generally, the Service Oriented Architecture – SOA), viewed as a tool for the integration of distributed resources, plays a significant role, not only to manage computational aspects, but increasingly as an aggregator of measurement instrumentation and pervasive large-scale data acquisition platforms. In this context, the functionality of a SOA allows managing, maintaining and exploiting heterogeneous instrumentation and acquisition devices in a unified way, by providing standardized interfaces and common working environments to their users, but the peculiar aspects of dealing with real instruments of widely different categories may add new functional requirements to this scenario. On the other hand, the growing transport capacity of core and access networks allows data transfer at unprecedented speed, but new challenges arise from wireless access, wireless sensor networks, and the traversal of heterogeneous network domains.