Importance-based multicriteria decision making with interval valued criteria satisfactions

Multiple-criteria decision problems involve selecting an alternative that best satisfies a collection of criteria as quantified by a scalar corresponding to an aggregation of the alternatives satisfaction to the individual criteria. A fundamental issue is the formulation of decision maker's aggregation function based upon the decision maker's perceived relationship between the criteria. Here, we allow the decision maker to express their perceived relationship between the criteria in terms of information about the criteria importances by providing a fuzzy measure over the criteria such that the measure of any subset of criteria is its importance. With the aid of the Choquet integral, we use this fuzzy measure of importances to construct an aggregation function. As the Choquet integral requires an ordering of an alternatives individual criteria satisfactions, special handling is required in the case when criteria satisfactions are interval valued rather then scalar. Here we use the golden rule representative value in the case of interval values.     

Reflections on and a short review of the science of team science

Scientometrics - We provide a short overview of the science of team science (SciTS). Starting from the notion of a scientific team, we move to interdisciplinary studies and finally the Science of...     

Foodborne outbreaks of microbial infection from fresh produce in Europe and North America: a systematic review of data from this millennium

This study focuses on foodborne outbreaks of microbial infection associated with fresh produce in Europe and North America from this millennium. A total of 277 outbreaks with 44 524 individual cases were identified. Foodborne pathogens associated with the most outbreak frequency include Cryptosporidium (20.5%) in Europe and Salmonella (52.2%) in North America although Norovirus (54.3%) and Salmonella (61.3%) were associated with the number of cases in Europe and North America, respectively. Vegetables were the most implicated fresh produce category with outbreak frequencies of 34.1% in Europe and 47.4% in North America. Increased consumption of fresh produce in Europe and North America, as measures to improve diets, correlates with the increased fresh produce-related outbreaks of microbial infection. This systematic review suggests the need for more rapid methodologies for traceback investigations in order to determine trends and epicentres of foodborne infections related to fresh produce.     

Qualitative relativizations of complexity classes

The principal result of this paper is a “positive relativization” of the open question “P = ?$\text{NP ? co-NP}$.” That is, the nondeterministic polynomial time-bounded oracle Turing machine endowed with designated accepting states and with designated rejecting states is considered, and suitable restrictions R of this device are developed such that $\text{P = NP ? co-NP}$ if and only if for every oracle D, P(D) = NP_R(D), where NP_R(D) is the class of languages L?NP(D) that are accepted by oracle machines operating with restrictions R. Positive relativizations are obtained for the P = ? $\text{U}$ ? co - $\text{U}$ and $\text{U}$ = ? NP questions also, where $\text{U}$ is the class of languages L in NP accepted by nondeterministic machines that operate in polynomial time and that have for each input at most one accepting computation. The restrictions developed here are “qualitative” in the sense that they restrict the form and pattern of access to the oracle. In contrast, a previous paper [3] developed quantitative relativizations-the number of distinct queries to the oracle is restricted-but no quantitative positive relativization of $\text{P = ? NP ? co-NP}$ is known.     

Some performance comparisons for a fluid dynamics code

The 3D transient motion of a buoyancy-driven perfect gas in an enclosure is computed by a FORTRAN program (BF3D). A combustion model for eventual inclusion in this program is under development. BF3D changes slowly, has a long lifetime, and is run fairly infrequently. Typical runs have large storage and CPU requirements. BF3D runs on large supercomputers but the newer mini-supercomputers appear to be suitable also and may be advantageous for ease of access and usage. Programming workstations are convenient for development. Comparisons of BF3D on selected supercomputers, mini-supercomputers, scientific workstations and conventional mainframes are presented for the purpose of making partial benchmark data available to the computing public.     

Texture in hot-worked B2-structure aluminides

Three B2 structure aluminide sheet materials produced by hot-rolling of alloys from compacted powders were evaluated for crystallographic texture. Two essentially binary NiAl alloys showed strong components in the plane of the sheet. A NiFeAl alloy had dramatically different texture which consisted of a strong components in the plane of the sheet. In addition to microstructures, measured pole figures and the orientation distribution function are reported and compared with textures produced in similar materials via extrusion.