This book focuses on organization and mechanisms of expert decision-making support using modern information and communication technologies, as well as information analysis and collective intelligence technologies (electronic expertise or simply e-expertise). Chapter 1 (E-Expertise) discusses the role of e-expertise in decision-making processes. The procedures of e-expertise are classified, their benefits and shortcomings are identified, and the efficiency conditions are considered. Chapter 2 (Expert Technologies and Principles) provides a comprehensive overview of modern expert technologies. A special emphasis is placed on the specifics of e-expertise. Moreover, the authors study the feasibility and reasonability of employing well-known methods and approaches in e-expertise. Chapter 3 (E-Expertise: Organization and Technologies) describes some examples of up-to-date technologies to perform e-expertise. Chapter 4 (Trust Networks and Competence Networks) deals with the problems of expert finding and grouping by information and communication technologies. Chapter 5 (Active Expertise) treats the problem of expertise stability against any strategic manipulation by experts or coordinators pursuing individual goals. The book addresses a wide range of readers interested in management, decision-making and expert activity in political, economic, social and industrial spheres.

This book contains the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Distributed Computer and Communication Networks (DCCN 2013). The conference is a continuation of traditional international conferences of the DCCN series, which took place in Bulgaria (Sofia, 1995, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009), Israel (Tel Aviv, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2001), and Russia (Moscow, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2011) in the last 16 years. The main idea of the conference is to assemble researchers from various countries working in the area of theory and applications of distributed computer and communication networks, to exchange the expertise, and to discuss the perspectives of development and collaboration in this area. The content of this volume is related to the following subjects: 1. Computer and communication networks architecture optimization 2. Control in computer and communication networks 3. Performance and QoS evaluation in wireless networks 4. Modeling and simulation of network protocols 5. Queueing theory 6. Wireless IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15, IEEE 802.16 and UMTS (LTE) networks 7. FRID technology and its application in intellectual transportation networks 8. Protocols design (MAC, Routing) for centimeter and millimeter wave mesh networks 9. Internet and Web applications and services 10. Application integration in distributed information systems

Abstract We present an analysis of the distribution of voting power in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic based on the outcomes of the nine general elections in the period 1919–1933. The paper contains a brief description of the political and electoral system of the Weimar Republic and a characterization of the main political actors and their political views. The power distributions are evaluated by means of the Banzhaf index and two new indices which take into account the parties’ preferences to coalesce. A model is constructed to evaluate the parties’ preferences with reference to the closeness of the ideological positions in a one-dimensional political space. Keywords Power distribution · Preferences · Reichstag · Weimar Republic

In this paper, we analyze a tandem queueing system consisting of R multi-server stations without buffers. The input flow at the first station is a MAP (Markovian arrival process). The customers from this flow aim to be served at all R stations of the tandem. For any r-th station, besides transit customers proceeding from the (r − 1)-th station, an additional MAP flow of new customers arrives at the r-th station directly, not entering the previous stations of the tandem. Customers from this flow aim to be served at the r-th station and all subsequent stations of the tandem. The service time of any customer arriving at the r-th station is exponentially distributed with the service rate depending of r. We present the recursive scheme for calculating the stationary distributions and the loss probabilities associated with the tandem.

In practice it is important to evaluate the impact of clusters of extreme observations caused by the dependence in time series. The clusters contain consecutive exceedances of time series over a threshold separated by return intervals with consecutive non-exceedances. We derive asymptotically equal distributions of the number of inter-arrival times between events of interest arising both between two consecutive exceedances of a stationary process $\{R_n:n\ge 1\}$ and between two consecutive non-exceedances. It is found that the distributions are geometric like and corrupted by the extremal index. It is derived that the limit distribution tail of the duration of clusters that is %are defined as a sum of the random number of the weakly dependent regularly varying inter-arrival times with tail index $0