drought stress is one of the most important factors limiting the productivity of crop plants around the world. genotype-by environment (g×e) interactions are common under drought and make breeding progress difficult. for this reason twenty genotypes of bread wheat were evaluated in a randomized complete block design with 3 replications at 2 locations (stress and non-stress environments) in two ...

In this paper, the authors present a computational model of a fundamental social phenomenon in the study of animal behavior: the foraging. The purpose of this work is, first, to test the validity of the proposed model compared to another existing model, the flocking model; then, to try to understand whether the model may provide useful suggestions in studying the size of the group in some speci...

Introduction Although platinum-containing catalysts are available as electrode catalysts for PEFCs, they are very expensive. Alternatives to Pt catalysts are being developed through ongoing experimental and theoretical studies. In recent years, with dramatic improvements in the performance of low-cost computers, several theoretical studies of the catalytic properties of electrode catalysts for ...

This chapter proposal describes some artificial neural network (ANN) neuromodeling techniques used in association with powerful optimization tools, such as natural optimization algorithms and wavelet transforms, which can be used in a variety of applications in Engineering, for example, Electromagnetism (Cruz, 2009), Signal Processing (Peixoto et al., 2009b) and Pattern Recognition and Classifi...

Inspired by social behavior of bird flocking or fish schooling, Eberhart and Kennedy first developed the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm in 1995. PSO, as a branch of evolutionary computation, has been successfully applied in many research and application areas in the past several years, e.g., global optimization, artificial neural network training, and fuzzy system control, etc.. Es...

Particle swarm optimisation (PSO) was born just over ten years ago. The initial ideas on particle swarms of Kennedy and Eberhart were aimed at producing computational intelligence by exploiting simple analogues of social interaction, rather than purely individual cognitive abilities. The first simulations [1] were influenced by Heppner’s and Grenander’s work [2] and involved analogues of bird f...

INTRODUCTION The development of viable bio-based energy systems offers many potential benefits relative to energy availability, national security, a cleaner environment, and associated economic rewards (DOE 2000). Largescale bioenergy use will require the deployment of environmentally acceptable energy crops and cropping systems for producing large quantities of low-cost, high-quality biomass f...