Performance of supply chain collaboration – A simulation study

In the past few decades several supply chain management initiatives such as Vendor Managed Inventory, Continuous Replenishment and Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) have been proposed in literature to improve the performance of supply chains. But, identifying the benefits of collaboration is still a big challenge for many supply chains. Confusion around the optimum number of partners, investment in collaboration and duration of partnership are some of the barriers of healthy collaborative arrangements. To evolve competitive supply chain collaboration (SCC), all SC processes need to be assessed from time to time for evaluating the performance. In a growing field, performance measurement is highly indispensable in order to make continuous improvement; in a new field, it is equally important to check the performance to test conduciveness of SCC. In this research, collaborative performance measurement will act as a testing tool to identify conducive environment to collaborate, by the way of pinpointing areas requiring improvements before initializing collaboration. We use actual industrial data and simulation to help managerial decision-making on the number of collaborating partners, the level of investments and the involvement in supply chain processes. This approach will help the supply chains to obtain maximum benefit of collaborative relationships. The use of simulation for understanding the performance of SCC is relatively a new approach and this can be used by companies that are interested in collaboration without having to invest a huge sum of money in establishing the actual collaboration.     

Dynamics of fluid circulation in coupled free and heterogeneous porous domains

Fluid flow in coupled free and porous domain, particularly when the porous medium is heterogeneous, is encountered in many hydro-environmental conditions, e.g., leakage from underground pipe, combined groundwater lake-subsurface interactions. One of the most difficult problems in the study of coupled flow behaviour has been the development of a universally applicable modelling scheme for combining the flow regimes. This is because the free/porous interfacial properties (e.g., shear-stress; velocity slip) that govern the coupled flow behaviour are difficult to determine experimentally under hydro-environmental conditions. On the other hand, the implications of various forms of heterogeneity in the porous media properties can be very different on the fluid-flow behaviour. Difficulties may also arise in direct coupling of the model equations that govern the fluid flow in the individual regions (e.g., Navier-Stokes for free-flow region and the Darcy's equation for the porous flow region). Consequently, models of coupled free and porous flow for hydro-environmental conditions are not very well developed at the moment. While there are some indications that fluids in coupled free and porous domains may circulate (i.e., development of flow cells), there is a lack of appropriate 3D analysis on how heterogeneities in porous media may affect such flow patterns. In this paper, we aim to analyse how porous media heterogeneity affects the dynamics of flow circulation in the porous side of a coupled free and porous domain. For this purpose, we analyse flow patterns in several model domains made up of two porous layers with differing permeabilities. The governing model equations are discretised and solved using the standard finite volume method on a staggered cell-centred mesh. The temporal discretisation is done using the explicit method. An in-house graphical user interface (GUI) has been created specifically to aid in the visualisation of otherwise complex flow patterns. The GUI contains many post-processing options and provides a comprehensive tool for the analysis of hydrodynamics and contaminant motion (not discussed in this paper) in coupled free and porous flow domains. This GUI is described in this paper briefly. The effects of altering the aspect ratio (i.e., multi-scale) of the domain on the coupled flow pattern have also been discussed.     

Augment low-field intra-operative MRI with preoperative MRI using a hybrid non-rigid registration method

Background

Preoperatively acquired diffusion tensor image (DTI) and blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) have been proved to be effective in providing more anatomical and functional information; however, the brain deformation induced by brain shift and tumor resection severely impairs the correspondence between the image space and the patient space in image-guided neurosurgery.

Method

To address the brain deformation, we developed a hybrid non-rigid registration method to register high-field preoperative MRI with low-field intra-operative MRI in order to recover the deformation induced by brain shift and tumor resection. The registered DTI and BOLD are fused with low-field intra-operative MRI for image-guided neurosurgery.

Results

The proposed hybrid registration method was evaluated by comparing the landmarks predicted by the hybrid registration method with the landmarks identified in the low-field intra-operative MRI for 10 patients. The prediction error of the hybrid method is 1.92 ± 0.54 mm, and the compensation accuracy is 74.3 ± 5.0%. Compared to the landmarks far from the resection region, those near the resection region demonstrated a higher compensation accuracy (P-value = .003) although these landmarks had larger initial displacements.

Conclusions

The proposed hybrid registration method is able to bring preoperatively acquired BOLD and DTI into the operating room and compensate for the deformation to augment low-field intra-operative MRI with rich anatomical and functional information.     

基于海量搜索历史数据的用户兴趣模型

针对互联网搜索引擎环境中,基于海量搜索历史数据分析用户兴趣的问题,提出一种改进的用户兴趣模型。该模型根据用户搜索的历史数据,结合向量空间模型（ VSM ）和TF-IDF算法,递归地回溯出用户兴趣权重列表。为解决用户兴趣变化和时间性能的问题,该模型引入时间遗忘机制进行动态更新,并在Hadoop分布式系统架构下利用MapReduce分布式编程模型进行实现。实验结果表明,改进的用户兴趣模型的查准率和召回率都能达到50',具有较好的可行性和可用性。     

基于遗忘曲线的微博用户兴趣模型

为解决微博用户兴趣漂移问题,以人类记忆学中遗忘曲线为基础,提出一种微博用户兴趣模型,利用用户历史信息预测当前兴趣。在预测过程中,用户关注某信息的时间距离当前时间越远,该信息越容易被遗忘,其对用户当前兴趣的影响越小;用户关注某一领域的信息越多,印象越深刻,对该领域的兴趣度越高。这两点与人类对知识逐渐遗忘和重复学习的过程具有高度相似性,因此该模型预测准确性更高。实验结果表明,该模型能较好地预测微博用户兴趣,召回率可达85.3％,实用性较强。     

安全苛刻系统自动化测试的形式化语义模型

安全苛刻系统的可信性需求典型而迫切,其可信性评估和验证具有测试依赖性.安全苛刻系统一般是复杂系统,手工测试实际上不可行,发展自动化测试手段是必然趋势.针对安全苛刻系统测试过程自动化中存在的高阶协同、实时和时序性,以Ambient演算、CCS演算、论域理论等为基础,给出测试过程的高阶协同定义,建立一种层次化演算模型,为测试过程提供一种信息化和自动化手段.模型通过对被测产品、测试设备与测试任务的抽象与组织,给出安全苛刻系统测试过程自动化的工作模式.最后,通过扩展标记转换系统定义,给出高阶协同行为的收敛性和正确性的证明,论证了模型的可计算性,验证了安全苛刻系统测试的可自动化.模型已应用于航天器的自动化测试中,并成为航天器测试行为的日常工作规范.     

Exploring the Interactions of Storylines from Informative News Events

Today＇s news readers can be easily overwhelmed by the numerous news articles online. To cope with information overload, online news media publishes timelines for continuously developing news topics. However, the timeline summary does not show the relationship of storylines, and is not intuitive for readers to comprehend the development of a complex news topic. In this paper, we study a novel problem of exploring the interactions of storylines in a news topic. An interaction of two storylines is signified by informative news events that play a key role in both storylines. Storyline interactions can indicate key phases of a news topic, and reveal the latent connections among various aspects of the story. We address the coherence between news articles which is not considered in traditional similarity-based methods, and discover salient storyline interactions to form a clear, global picture of the news topic. User preference can be naturally integrated into our method to generate query-specific results. Comprehensive experiments on ten news topics show the effectiveness of our method over alternative approaches.     

融合全局和近邻协同信息的会话推荐算法

现有基于会话的推荐算法主要通过挖掘单个目标会话的项目转换关系进行推荐,对来自其他不同会话中项目之间的复杂转换信息考虑较少。为此,提出一种融合全局和近邻协同信息的会话推荐算法SFGN-GNN,同时考虑来自全局与近邻会话的协同信息,以充分挖掘用户偏好。通过学习会话表示来表达用户偏好,先按目标会话与近邻会话的成对项目转移关系构建近邻图,依据所有会话中的成对项目转移关系构建全局图,再利用图神经网络获取目标会话节点近邻级和全局级的项目表示,采用融合门融合得到会话级项目表示,并在其中嵌入项目在目标会话中的位置信息和时间信息,然后通过软注意力机制得到最终的会话表示,最后经过softmax函数预测下一个可能交互的项目。在两个数据集上的实验验证了SFGN-GNN算法有效性。     

基于云端协同计算架构的边缘端I/O密集型虚拟机资源分配方案

大型制造业生产车间业务流程复杂,传统固定资源配置方式将产生负载不均衡的问题。针对此问题,设计并实现了一种基于云端协同架构的边缘端I/O密集型虚拟机资源的分配算法,通过定义计算节点中每个I/O密集型虚拟机三个维度的信息计算得出I/O密集型虚拟机的优先级,并按最大优先级队列实时统一分配硬件资源。实验结果表明,该算法在应对工业机械设备高响应和高通量的要求上有较为明显的提升,为实际生产起到了优化资源配置的作用。     

能效优先的用户关联与功率控制协同优化机制

在异构蜂窝网络中,针对系统的能效,提出了一种基于效用函数最大化模型的用户关联与功率控制协同优化方案,该方案表示为非线性混合整数问题。为了求得该问题的最优解,设计了一种迭代算法,首先将原问题转换为带参数的多项式形式的问题,在外层循环利用Dinkelbach方法求得最佳的能效因子,然后在内层循环分别求得最佳的用户关联矩阵和传输功率。最终实验结果表明,用户关联与功率控制协同的优化方案在能效和负载平衡方面比固定功率条件下的用户关联策略的性能更优。