Why CEPS has to be the basis for the Euro-purse

On January 1^st, 2002, European citizens will be able to use their ‘domestic-issue’ euro currency in any of the 11 European Monetary Union nations. But to date, there are no plans for an electronic purse that can be used across Euroland. The smart card industry’s premier trade association has come up with a solution.     

Remark on the reliability function of a symmetric channel under list decoding

We complete the derivation of a formula for the reliability function of a q-ary symmetric channel under list decoding at zero rate.     

A generalized courier problem with the cost function depending on the list of tasks

The problem of routing movements on a finite system of sets with constraints in the form of antecedence (the generalized courier problem) is addressed. The specific feature of the problem is that the cost function for the movement from one set to another involves a dependence on a list of remaining jobs on visiting of the mentioned sets.     

基于费用函数的测试性指标优化分配方法

测试性指标的优化分配关系到改进系统测试性水平所需的费用。建立了基于费用函数的测试性指标优化分配模型。根据费用函数需满足的基本要求,以费用最小为目标,设计了一种实用的非线性费用函数。分析了费用函数中各参数对费用的影响以及各参数的获取方法。针对该非线性规划问题,在给定的系统测试性指标下,采用遗传算法求解全局最优解。应用结果表明遗传算法能够获得合理的测试性分配值,费用函数可以用于系统测试性指标的优化分配。     

Trust, control strategies and allocation of function in human-machine systems.

As automated controllers supplant human intervention in controlling complex systems, the operators' role often changes from that of an active controller to that of a supervisory controller. Acting as supervisors, operators can choose between automatic and manual control. Improperly allocating function between automatic and manual control can have negative consequences for the performance of a system. Previous research suggests that the decision to perform the job manually or automatically depends, in part, upon the trust the operators invest in the automatic controllers. This paper reports an experiment to characterize the changes in operators' trust during an interaction with a semi-automatic pasteurization plant, and investigates the relationship between changes in operators' control strategies and trust. A regression model identifies the causes of changes in trust, and a 'trust transfer function' is developed using time series analysis to describe the dynamics of trust. Based on a detailed analysis of operators' strategies in response to system faults we suggest a model for the choice between manual and automatic control, based on trust in automatic controllers and self-confidence in the ability to control the system manually.     

Pilot performance and preference for short cycles of automation in adaptive function allocation

The present experiment examined pilot response to the rapid cycling of automation. The experiment was conducted using a multi-task simulation environment consisting of tracking, fuel management, and system monitoring sub-tasks. Monitoring and fuel management sub-tasks were performed manually in all conditions. The tracking sub-task cycled between manual and automated control at fixed intervals of either 15, 30 or 60 sec. These cycle times were completely crossed with three levels of tracking difficulty giving nine within-subject conditions which lasted 5 min each. Performance was measured on each of the sub-tasks, as was pilot fatigue level and subjective workload for the respective conditions. Results indicated that both difficulty and cycle duration significantly affected tracking performance which was degraded with task difficulty and longer cycle times. Fuel management and system monitoring performance were unaffected by tracking difficulty and automation duration. However, a subsequent analysis was conducted using the 15 sec period immediately following each automation episode as a ‘window’ of performance. A different pattern of results was observed. Tracking performance was similarly affected by difficulty, but was no longer affected by cycle duration. Furthermore, fuel management error indicated a trend toward better performance in low difficulty conditions. Results illustrate micro trade-offs within sub-tasks and macro trade-offs between sub-tasks. Overall, the results support the contention that excessively short cycles of automation prove disruptive to performance in multi-task conditions.     

Adaptive function allocation stabilization and a comparison of trigger types and adaptation strategies

Two experiments were conducted to (1) test and quantify the effect of an adaptive function allocation system on human performance under different combinations of trigger type (heart rate vs. performance-based) and function allocation adaptation strategy (complete reallocation, partial reallocation, partial transformation) and (2) to determine if the adaptive function allocation system continues to actively change the level of automation over relatively long periods of time (30 min). It was found that the adaptive function allocation system improves primary task performance by, on average, 6% and does not improve secondary task performance. In addition, the level of automation did not stabilize over the 30 min, suggesting the adaptive function a system continues to be relevant even over longer periods of time. Lastly, the study found that the use of heart rate as a trigger mechanism resulted in many more reallocations of function than a performance-based measure.     

An improvement on the Migrating Birds Optimization with a problem-specific neighboring function for the multi-objective task allocation problem

Allocating tasks to processors is a well-known NP-Hard problem in distributed computing systems. Due to the lack of practicable exact solutions, it has been attracted by the researchers working on heuristic-based suboptimal search algorithms. With the recent inclusion of multiple objectives such as minimizing the cost, maximizing the throughput and maximizing the reliability, the problem gets even more complex and an efficient approximate method becomes more valuable. In this work, I propose a new solution for the multi-objective task allocation problem. My solution consists in designing a problem-specific neighboring function for an existing metaheuristic algorithm that is proven to be successful in quadratic assignment problems. The neighboring function, namely greedy reassignment with maximum release (GR-MR), provides a dynamic mechanism to switch the preference of the search between the exploration and exploitation. The experiments validate both that the quality of the solutions are close to the optimal and the proposed method performs significantly better comparing to three other metaheuristic algorithms. Neighboring functions being the common reusable components of metaheuristic algorithms, GR-MR can also be utilized by other metaheuristic-based solutions in the future.     

Stochastic scheduling: A short history of index policies and new approaches to index generation for dynamic resource allocation

In the 1970’s John Gittins discovered that multi-armed bandits, an important class of models for the dynamic allocation of a single key resource among a set of competing projects, have optimal solutions of index form. At each decision epoch such policies allocate the resource to whichever project has the largest Gittins index. Since the 1970’s, Gittins’ index result together with a range of developments and reformulations of it have constituted an influential stream of ideas and results contributing to research into the scheduling of stochastic objects. We give a brief account of many of the most important contributions to this work and proceed to describe how index theory has recently been developed to produce strongly performing heuristic policies for the dynamic allocation of a divisible resource to a collection of stochastic projects (or bandits). A limitation on this work concerns the need for the structural requirement of indexability which is notoriously difficult to establish. We introduce a general framework for the development of index policies for dynamic resource allocation which circumvents this difficulty. We utilise this framework to generate index policies for two model classes of independent interest. Their performance is evaluated in an extensive numerical study.     

Continuous prediction of manufacturing performance throughout the production lifecycle

We describe methods for continual prediction of manufactured product quality prior to final testing. In our most expansive modeling approach, an estimated final characteristic of a product is updated after each manufacturing operation. Our initial application is for the manufacture of microprocessors, and we predict final microprocessor speed. Using these predictions, early corrective manufacturing actions may be taken to increase the speed of expected slow wafers (a collection of microprocessors) or reduce the speed of fast wafers. Such predictions may also be used to initiate corrective supply chain management actions. Developing statistical learning models for this task has many complicating factors: (a) a temporally unstable population (b) missing data that is a result of sparsely sampled measurements and (c) relatively few available measurements prior to corrective action opportunities. In a real manufacturing pilot application, our automated models selected 125 fast wafers in real-time. As predicted, those wafers were significantly faster than average. During manufacture, downstream corrective processing restored 25 nominally unacceptable wafers to normal operation.     

The correctness of the Schorr-Waite list marking algorithm

Summary This paper presents a relatively simple proof of a nontrivial algorithm for marking all the nodes of a list structure. The proof separates properties of the algorithm from properties of the data on which it operates and is a significant application of the method of intermittent assertions.(This paper grew out of an earlier version which was submitted to this journal on October 16, 1974)     

ADI公司公布2008大学设计竞赛获奖者

2008年11月5日,全球领先的高性能信号处理解决方案供应商Analog Devices,Inc.(纽约证券交易所代码:ADI)在西安电子科技大学(中国一流理工类高等学府之一)举办颁奖典礼,表彰"ADI 2008年度中吲大学创新设计竞赛"(UDC 2008)和"ADI 2008年度应用技术文章有奖征文竞赛(PPC 2008)"的获奖者,并奖励在竞赛中表现最出色的学生及其指导教师.     

计算机科学中链表的使用

数据结构是计算机学科的核心专业基础课程,线性表是数据结构中一个最基本的内容。本文分析了数据结构中单链表的建立、插入和删除运算的实现,并附以图示和相应的具体程序,在此基础上进一步介绍了双链表的建立、插入和删除运算,并以实例论述了链表的优点。使得在实际的学习中可以更形象、轻松的学习链表这部分的知识。     

Analysis of tree algorithms for the simulation event list

Summary The simulation event list is a priority queue found in simulation packages like SIMULA. Its task is to hold the pending events of the simulation, so that they can be executed in the correct order. For varying reasons, most standard algorithms are poorly suited to the special demands of this application.Recent work, on the average-case performance of the binary search tree (BST) and p-tree algorithms under these conditions, is presented. The algorithms are shown to be worse than O(log(n)) in many cases.     

On the longest increasing subsequence of a circular list

The longest increasing circular subsequence (LICS) of a list is considered. A Monte Carlo algorithm to compute it is given which has worst case execution time O(n3/2logn) and storage requirement O(n). It is proved that the expected length μ(n) of the LICS satisfies . Numerical experiments with the algorithm suggest that .     

Generalizations of the sethi-ullman algorithm for register allocation

The Sethi-Ullman algorithm for register allocation finds an optimal ordering of a computation tree. Two simple generalizations of the algorithm increase its applicability without significantly increasing its cost.