High-Level Design Approach for the Specification of Cognitive Radio Equipments Management APIs

Cognitive Radio (CR) equipments are radio devices that support the smart facilities offered by future cognitive networks. Even if several categories of equipments exist (terminal, base station, smart PDA, etc.), each requiring different processing capabilities (and associated cost or power consumption), these equipments have to integrate also a set of new capabilities as regards CR support, in addition to the usual radio signal processing elements. This implies real-time radio adaptation and sensing capabilities, but not only. We assert that it is necessary to add inside the radio equipments some management facilities for that purpose, and we propose in this paper a high-level design approach for the specification of a management framework. This includes a set of designing rules, based on hierarchical units that are distributed over three levels, and the associated APIs necessary to efficiently manage CR features inside a CR equipment. The proposed architecture is called HDCRAM (Hierarchical and Distributed Cognitive Architecture Management). HDCRAM is an extension of a former hierarchical and distributed reconfiguration management (HDReM) architecture, which is derived from our previous research on Software Defined Radio (SDR). The HDCRAM adds to the HDReM’s reconfiguration management facilities the necessary new management features, which enable the support of sensing and decision making facilities. It consists in the combination of one Cognitive Radio Management Unit (CRMU) with each Reconfiguration Management Unit (ReMU) distributed within the equipment. Each of these CRMU is in charge of the capture, the interpretation and the decision making according to its own goals. In this Cognitive Radio context, the term “decision” refers to the adaptation of the radio parameters to the equipment’s environment. This paper details the HDCRAM’s management functionality and structure. Moreover, in order to facilitate the early design phase of the management specification, which is new in radio design, HDCRAM has also been modeled with a meta-programming language based on UML. But beyond the first objective of high-level specification, we have also derived a simulator from the obtained meta-model, thanks to the use of an executable language. This gives the opportunity to specify the CR needs and play a wide variety of scenarios, in order to validate the CR equipment’s design. This approach provides high-level design facilities for the specification of cognitive management APIs inside a cognitive radio equipment.     

基于工作流技术的航材保障系统

针对未来信息化战争对航材保障的效率提出的更高要求,对工作流技术和航材保障研究现状进行分析,建立将工作流技术应用到航材保障中的生命周期图,并研究生命周期的每一环节。应用工作流技术对于航材保障势必产生巨大的军事效益。     

Mechanisms for object caching in distributed applications using Java RMI

Remote Method Invocation (RMI), a mechanism to access remote objects in Java‐based distributed applications, uses network communication for each method invocation. Consequently, using RMI in a wide‐area environment can cause poor application performance. One solution to improve performance is to cache the objects such that network communication is not necessary for each method invocation. In this paper, we present mechanisms to transparently add object caching to RMI. These mechanisms are compatible with existing RMI applications and use an event‐based model to support different consistency policies. The mechanisms also include the ability to adaptively select the consistency policy for an object based on its usage pattern. A novel feature of our mechanisms is the use of a ‘reduced object’, which is a partial representation of the RMI object. We experimentally evaluate and demonstrate the benefits of our mechanisms. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于云平台的共享制造模式定价策略

在共享制造背景下,设备制造商可以通过两种方式向消费者提供服务:直接出售生产型设备给消费者,通过云平台提供制造服务:在购买模式下,讨论消费者的决策行为以及设备制造商的最优定价策略;在服务模式下,采用逆向归纳法分别求解基于商业性云平台(最大化自身收益)和基于公益性云平台(最大化社会总效益)的多阶段动态博弈问题.通过比较两种模式下设备制造商的利润,给出其选择不同商业模式的条件.同时,研究云平台普及率对消费者效用和设备制造商利润的影响,以及两种不同商业模式的环境效益.对于公益性云平台,设计返利机制协调供应链效率.研究表明,当云平台将收益全部返利给消费者时,社会总效益最大.从充分利用社会资源、提高社会经济和环境效益的角度进行分析,为供应链各参与方提供决策参考.     

A method to select a successful interoperability solution through a simulation approach

Enterprise applications and software systems need to be interoperable in order to achieve seamless business across organizational boundaries and thus realize virtual networked organizations. Our proposition can be considered as an interoperability project selection approach and is based on three steps: (1) Modelling both collaborative business processes and potential related interoperability projects; (2) Evaluating the accessibility of each project regarding the current state of the organization; (3) Simulating each project and assessing the associated performance. These results are finally projected on a comparison matrix used as a decision support to select the most appropriate interoperability solution. An application case extracted from the French aerospace sector demonstrates the applicability and the benefits of the proposition.     

基于现代自动化技术的钢管排管锯电控系统利旧改造

钢管排管锯系一种大型机电一体化设备,其电气设备经过多年运行后,性能已经下降。由于无备件,设备被闲置,造成企业资源浪费。利用西门子、施耐德、图尔克等公司的通用电气产品对攀成钢159厂的钢管排管锯的电控系统实施了改造,使旧设备恢复了原有性能,其操作和维护也更加方便和快捷。     

Could large UK corporations and computing companies use software cost estimating tools? – a survey

Software cost estimating tools were developed to address the problem of estimating the size and cost of software projects. Recent surveys, however, have shown that few managers use such tools. This survey formulated and tested a number of propositions in order to explain this apparent lack of use. Large UK corporations and computing companies were targeted, since it was believed that such companies would give more information on the use of estimating tools. It was found that while almost all saw estimation as a problem and used some form of project planning tool, fewer than a third used any form of estimating tool. The lack of a framework to support their development and use, and a failure of publicity on the part of the vendors, appear to be the two most common explanations for the non-use of estimating tools. However, it seems that a substantial proportion of companies which could use estimating tools simply choose not to do so.     

The Electronic Voting System for the United States House of Representatives

The most important voting procedure traditionally utilized in the United States House of Representatives to resolve legislative issues involves a time-consuming roll call of Representatives' names. It has been recognized for a number of years that this cumbersome feature of the legislative process could be automated so that a more efficient use of Members' time would be possible. The year 1970 saw the fruition of several years' effort to achieve a broad range of Congressional reforms. Not since 1946, when important structural changes in Committees and their staffs were made, had there been a generalized reform of Congressional, procedures. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 (PL 91-510) in section 121 specifically provides that electronic equipment may be used to record votes in the. House of Representatives. The Senate, a body of only 100, has not chosen to employ automated voting procedures.     

Older Adults Talk Technology: Technology Usage and Attitudes

Older adults (n = 113) participated in focus groups discussing their use of and attitudes about technology in the context of their home, work, and healthcare. Participants reported using a wide variety of technology items, particularly in their homes. Positive attitudes (i.e., likes) outnumbered negative attitudes (i.e., dislikes), suggesting that older adults perceive the benefits of technology use to outweigh the costs of such use. Positive attitudes were most frequently related to how the technology supported activities, enhanced convenience, and contained useful features. Negative attitudes were most frequently associated with technology creating inconveniences, unhelpful features, as well as security and reliability concerns. Given that older adults reported more positive than negative attitudes about the technologies they use, these results contradict stereotypes that older adults are afraid or unwilling to use technology. These findings also highlight the importance of perceived benefits of use and ease of use for models of technology acceptance. Emphasizing the benefits of technology in education and training programs may increase future technology adoption.     

Vision-based action recognition of earthmoving equipment using spatio-temporal features and support vector machine classifiers

Video recordings of earthmoving construction operations provide understandable data that can be used for benchmarking and analyzing their performance. These recordings further support project managers to take corrective actions on performance deviations and in turn improve operational efficiency. Despite these benefits, manual stopwatch studies of previously recorded videos can be labor-intensive, may suffer from biases of the observers, and are impractical after substantial period of observations. This paper presents a new computer vision based algorithm for recognizing single actions of earthmoving construction equipment. This is particularly a challenging task as equipment can be partially occluded in site video streams and usually come in wide variety of sizes and appearances. The scale and pose of the equipment actions can also significantly vary based on the camera configurations. In the proposed method, a video is initially represented as a collection of spatio-temporal visual features by extracting space–time interest points and describing each feature with a Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG). The algorithm automatically learns the distributions of the spatio-temporal features and action categories using a multi-class Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. This strategy handles noisy feature points arisen from typical dynamic backgrounds. Given a video sequence captured from a fixed camera, the multi-class SVM classifier recognizes and localizes equipment actions. For the purpose of evaluation, a new video dataset is introduced which contains 859 sequences from excavator and truck actions. This dataset contains large variations of equipment pose and scale, and has varied backgrounds and levels of occlusion. The experimental results with average accuracies of 86.33% and 98.33% show that our supervised method outperforms previous algorithms for excavator and truck action recognition. The results hold the promise for applicability of the proposed method for construction activity analysis.