Author Description

In response to the cumulative criticality of software within systems and the increasing demands being put onto 21st century systems, systems and software engineering developments will progress significantly over the next two decades. Today, analysts and traders dispense over historical price data and qualitative research looking for an edge, a new way to make money or reduce risk. Front-office financial engineers and traders utilize real time data feeds and virtually entirely Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet environment for both research and enactment in a time-critical environment. This book is aimed to inform the readers about state of the art of software engineering covering results of consolidated research and innovations in software engineering and related areas, including methods and practices, object-oriented systems, rapid prototyping, ambiguity in software development, knowledge engineering methods and practices, logic programming, knowledge-based systems and deductive database systems. Software provides both competitive differentiation and rapid adaptability to competitive change. It facilitates rapid tailoring of products and services to different market sectors, and rapid and flexible supply chain management. The resulting software-intensive systems face ever-increasing demands to provide safe, secure, and reliable systems; to provide competitive discriminators in the marketplace; to support the coordination of multicultural global enterprises; to enable rapid adaptation to change; and to help people cope with complex masses of data and information. This book disseminates state-of-the-art in all areas of software engineering, covering all aspects of software engineering and related hardware-software-systems issues. This book will appeal to practicing engineers and academicians, as well as researchers understanding various new issues and development in the field of software engineering.