The Lazy Cook Problem, or Scheduling Two Parallel Machines to Optimize Vehicle Utilization

A cook has to prepare n cakes using an oven with two racks. According to the recipe, the i-th cake has to be baked for exactly a _i minutes. Cakes to be cooked are taken from a table and carried to the oven, and once cooked are carried back to the table by means of a trolley that can carry two cakes at a time. What is the minimum number q ^* of round trips required of the cook? This problem has application to the operation scheduling of transportation systems and to material cutting. A different problem arises according to whether the cook accepts or not to stay near the oven for awhile with the trolley. If the trolley cannot be idle at the oven, an optimum schedule with no oven idle-time always exists: consequently, the trolley schedule is trivial, and the problem is transformed into a set packing. For this case, we propose and test a heuristic method which generates all of the promising columns of the set packing, and solves the resulting problem by branch-and-bound. Instead, if the trolley can be idle at the oven for a limited amount of time, a problem arises to find an optimal schedule of the trolley: in this case we show how to use a scaling technique in order to obtain a very good feasible solution by the method above.     

Application of parallelized analogical planning to engineering design

Analogical planning provides a means of solving engineering problems where other machine learning methods fail. Unlike many machine learning paradigms, analogy does not require numerous previous examples or a rich domain theory. Instead, analogical planners adapt knowledge of solved problems in similar domains to the current problem. Unfortunately, the analogical planning task is an expensive one. While the process of forming correspondences between a known problem and a new problem is complex, the problem of selecting a base case for the analogy is virtually intractable.This paper addresses the issue of efficiently forming analogical plans. The Anagram planning system is described, which takes advantage of the massively parallel architecture of the Connection Machine to perform base selection and map formation. Anagram provides a tractable solution to analogical planning, with a complexity that is sublinear in the size of the plans.This paper describes the Anagram system and its parallel algorithms. The paper also presents theoretical analyses and empirical results of testing the system on a large database of plans from the domain of automatic programming.     

不甩线圈的多星形移相变极

对于某些槽数和极数比的多星形移相变极电机,提出与前人不同的是在两种极数下均不甩去线圈的绕组方案,使绕组利用率高,且线圈及其联接都较简单.这种绕组方案在一种极数下并联支路略有不平衡,其所引起的电机定子铜耗的增加是极其有限的,不致影响电机的正常运行.     

Protecting mobile agents＇ data using trusted computing technology

Even with attractive computational advantages, mobile agent technology has not developed its full potential due to various security issues. This paper proposes a method called Private Key Consignment to solve the problem of how to protect the data carried by mobile agents. It exploits new functionalities and mechanism provided by the trusted computing technology, and adopts both public key and symmetric key cryptographic means for data and key protection. The most notable feature of this method is that it protects the private key of the agent by consigning it to a tamper proof hardware, thus, enabling convenient and secure use of the private key. It provides a new scheme of mobile agents＇ data protection.     

Using Automated Negotiation for Grid Services

The popularity of grid services has widened their application to numerous domains and increased the utilization of computational resources. In order to create more incentives for the resources owners to lease their resources and prevent users from wasting the resources, the introduction of a market-oriented grid is inevitable. However, the issues for the negotiation between service provider and consumer over the supply and demand of resources can be complex, with highly interdependent issues. In this research, a simulated automated negotiation mechanism including a co-evolutionary mechanism and a modified game theory approach is proposed, to assist them in reaching an agreement over the conflicting issues. In the proposed architecture, the co-evolution process is able to reduce the multiple dimensional search space into a two-dimension search space and identify the appropriate negotiation strategies for the negotiating agents to form a payoff matrix which can be used for the game theory related stage of their interaction. The multiple stage negotiation process is introduced to improve the negotiation result. In this paper, an application which requires a large amount of computational resources to process the data generated from mobile devises is used to demonstrate that the proposed system is able to resolve the conflicts and obtain a valid solution.     

K-230B镗床万向护板的设计

介绍了大型机床地坑移动盖板的一般设计思想,根据机床原有功能和结构特点,设计兼顾防尘防屑和美观大方两大特点的活动盖板,为同类设计提供一些参考。     

A survey on approaches to gridification

The Grid shows itself as a globally distributed computing environment, in which hardware and software resources are virtualized to transparently provide applications with vast capabilities. Just like the electrical power grid, the Grid aims at offering a powerful yet easy‐to‐use computing infrastructure to which applications can be easily ‘plugged’ and efficiently executed. Unfortunately, it is still very difficult to Grid‐enable applications, since current tools force users to take into account many details when adapting applications to run on the Grid. In this paper, we survey some of the recent efforts in providing tools for easy gridification of applications and propose several taxonomies to identify approaches followed in the materialization of such tools. We conclude this paper by describing common features among the proposed approaches, and by pointing out open issues and future directions in the research and development of gridification methods. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

面向智能计算的记忆结构理论综述

本文从智能计算角度出发，对记忆的总体结构、信息表征及记忆模型等方面的理论作一综述。并在分析、比较了这些理论与ＡＩ中的相关理论差异的基础上，对面向智能计算的记忆理论研究方法与方向作了扼要讨论。     

与性能相关的容错计算系统可靠性指标

对于某些容错计算系统，由于成功与故障之间没有明确的界限，用传统的可靠性指标难以准确地评价其容错性能，为此一些学者提出了若干与性能相关的可靠性指标。本文将这些指标概括成三类（即基于瞬时性能的指标、基于累积收益的指标和率模可靠性指标）加以介绍，并简要介绍了它们的求解方法。     

Parallel associative combinator evaluation II

A new evaluation model for SK combinator expressions is presented and used as a basis for the design of a novel processor. The resulting machine architecture resembles a dataflow ring, but executions are constrained to be fully lazy. An automatic dynamic load sharing mechanism for a distributed multiprocessor architecture is suggested, and initial simulation results are presented.