Intelligent Structural Systems (Solid Mechanics and Its Applications)

In recent years, "intelligent (sm. o. rt) structures antlllJ/stems" has become an emerging new research area that is multi-disciplinary in nature, requiring technical expertise from mechanical engineering, structural engineering, electrical engineering, applied mechanics, engineering mathematics, material science, computer science, biological science, etc. This technology is quite likely to contribute significant advancements in the design of high-performance structures, adaptive structures, high-precision systems, micro-systems, etc. Although this emerging area has been rapidly gathering momentum in the last few years, researchers are aware that to some extent only initial, but highly feasible studies of the concepts proposed have been conducted. It is obvious that many important, pertinent fundamental research subjects must yet be investigated and resolved in the near future. We have the privilege to invite a number of highly regarded research scientists and engineers to summarize and contribute the results of their years of research experience with the evolution of intelligent (smart) structures and systems to the collection of chapters contained in this book. Their research topics include current intelligent (smart) structures research activities, piezoelectric structures, shape memory alloy reinforced composites, applications of electrorheological fluids, intelligent sensor systems, adaptive precision trusses, damage detection, model refinement, control of axial moving continua, distributed transducers, etc. These subjects represent only a small portion of the complete picture; indeed, the fundamentally important development of smart or intelligent materials is not addressed in detail here.

This book contains substantially extended and revised versions of the best papers from the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2010), held in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, June 8-12, 2010.

Two invited papers are presented together with 39 contributions, which were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 full papers presented at the conference (out of 448 submissions). They reflect state-of-the-art research work that is often driven by real-world applications, thus successfully relating the academic with the industrial community. The topics covered are: databases and information systems integration, artificial intelligence and decision support systems, information systems analysis and specification, software agents and internet computing, and human-computer interaction.