Testing communication and computer networks: an overview

Many activities in today's organizations are becoming ever more dependent on communications and computer networks, and network managers are faced with the enormous challenge of increasing the availability and efficiency of their infrastructures, which grow both in size and complexity. This makes it crucial to plan network operation systematically, to define and implement appropriate procedures for regular monitoring and performance assessment, and to set up proper tools for maintenance and troubleshooting purposes. Furthermore, proactive network testing must be pursued; it is vital to gather some ideas of normal network operation documented in order to have a comparison term when problems occur. The article has dealt with the measurement instruments and procedures currently adopted for network testing and advances in the field for the I&M research community.     

Effects of zirconium silicate and chromite addition on the microstructure and bulk density of magnesia–magnesium aluminate spinel-based refractory materials

Six synthesized magnesium aluminate spinel-based refractory compositions used in steel and cement applications, were prepared using a two stage sintering process at 1760 °C, starting with approximately 1:1 wt% ratio of pure magnesia and alumina with additions of zirconium silicate (0.5, 1.0 and 2.0 wt%) and chromite (2.0, 3.0 and 5.0 wt%). These compositions were investigated for effects on densification, chemical and mineralogical phases formed.     

Influence of Reaction Parameters on the Hydrogenolysis of Hydroxymatairesinol Over Carbon Nanofibre Supported Palladium Catalysts

The density functional theory (DFT/B3LYP) calculations were applied to investigate the interaction of a Pt₆ particle with the ZSM-5 zeolite framework. The electronic structure of the metal particle is strongly affected by the interaction with basic framework oxygens and acid sites of the zeolite support. Adsorption on basic sites (E_ads = 6 kcal/mol) favors the formation of the electron enriched metal cluster. Interaction of the platinum cluster with the acid site characterized by stabilization energy of 47 kcal/mol results in oxidation of the metal particle and suppression of Brønsted acidity of the support. The hypothesis is put forward that the oxidized platinum particle can function as an active site for the alkane isomerisation on platinum supported high silica zeolites.     

公司大门工程建设施工

大门小品建筑属多项目综合性工程。本文作者从管理者的角度 ,通过对公司大门及附属工程施工质量控制的总结 ,说明了质量控制应贯穿于工程施工的全过程     

Composing RESTful Services and Collaborative Workflows: A Lightweight Approach

The use of RESTful Web services has gained momentum in the development of distributed applications based on traditional Web standards such as HTTP. In particular, these services can integrate easily into various applications, such as mashups. Composing RESTful services into Web-scale workflows requires a lightweight composition language that's capable of describing both the control and data flow that constitute a workflow. The authors address these issues with Bite, a lightweight and extensible composition language that enables the creation of Web-scale workflows and uses RESTful services as its main composable entities.     

Self-adjusting the intensity of assortative mating in genetic algorithms

Mate selection plays a crucial role in both natural and artificial systems. While traditional Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) usually engage in random mating strategies, that is, mating chance is independent of genotypic or phenotypic distance between individuals, in natural systems non-random mating is common, which means that somehow this mechanism has been favored during the evolutionary process. In non-random mating, the individuals mate according to their parenthood or likeness. Previous studies indicate that negative assortative mating (AM)—also known as dissortative mating—, which is a specific type of non-random mating, may improve EAs performance by maintaining the genetic diversity of the population at a higher level during the search process. In this paper we present the Variable Dissortative Mating Genetic Algorithm (VDMGA). The algorithm holds a mechanism that varies the GA’s mating restrictions during the run by means of simple rule based on the number of chromosomes created in each generation and indirectly influenced by the genetic diversity of the population. We compare VDMGA not only with traditional Genetic Algorithms (GA) but also with two preceding non-random mating EAs: the CHC algorithm and the negative Assortative Mating Genetic Algorithm (nAMGA). We intend to study the effects of the different methods in the performance of GAs and verify the reliability of the proposed algorithm when facing an heterogeneous set of landscapes. In addition, we include the positive Assortative Mating Genetic Algorithm (pAMGA) in the experiments in order test both negative and positive AM mechanisms, and try to understand if and when negative AM (or DM) speeds up the search process or enables the GAs to escape local optima traps. For these purposes, an extensive set of optimization test problems was chosen to cover a variety of search landscapes with different characteristics. Our results confirm that negative AM is effective in leading EAs out of local optima traps, and show that the proposed VDMGA is at least as efficient as nAMGA when applied to the range of our problems, being more efficient in very hard functions were traditional GAs usually fail to escape local optima. Also, scalability tests have been made that show VDMGA ability to decrease optimal population size, thus reducing the amount of evaluations needed to attain global optima. We like to stress that only two parameters need to be hand-tuned in VDMGA, thus reducing the tuning effort present in traditional GAs and nAMGA.