Contractor as Trust Initiator in Construction Partnering—Prisoner’s Dilemma Perspective

Partnering has been advocated for use in construction as a project-delivery approach to curb dispute and enable a cooperative contracting environment. Successful construction partnering is perceived to derive benefits to both developers and contractors. In view of significant implications to successful project delivery, there has been a surge of research and studies on construction partnering. These studies typically focus on the partnering process as well as the identification of critical success factors. Among the various success factors that underpin partnering success, establishing trust among partners is considered the most important. Moreover, skeptics have been swift to point out that establishing trust in construction is daunting. A better understanding of the role of trust and its manifestation in partnering efforts is therefore of both academic and practical value. In this study, motivating trust in construction partnering is described within the classic framework of “the prisoner’s dilemma,” which suggests the trust cycle can be kick-started if construction partners put cooperation before competition and self-interest. This paper reports a study that is designed to suggest a suitable candidate for the trust initiator. As such, the critical trust factors for two groups of construction partners in Hong Kong—developers/consultants and contractors—are first identified. It is found that “performance” and “permeability” of partners are the two most critical trust factors. “Performance” describes the partner’s competence and problem-solving ability as perceived by their counterpart. “Permeability” reflects the partner’s openness in sharing information. The result of a multiple-regression analysis further suggests that the contractor is in a position to initiate trust through competent performance and maintaining effective communication with the client. In this manner, the trust cycle can expand with reciprocal trustworthiness from the client.     

Optimal power control system of a research nuclear reactor

The power control system is a key control system for a nuclear reactor, which directly concerns the safe operation of a nuclear reactor. Much attention is paid to the power control system performance of nuclear reactor in engineering. The designers put a high value upon design of an optimal power control system. In this paper, a design method is applied to the design of power control system. According to the optimal control theory, an objective function, quadratic performance index with weight factors is proposed. Then, the objective function is transformed into frequency domain form by use of Paserval's theorem. In frequency domain, an optimal transfer function can be obtained at the lowest value of objective function. The system with optimal transfer function has an optimal performance. The transfer function of the power control system is derived from a typical research nuclear reactor. Using the state feedback theory, the transfer function is synthesized to the optimal transfer function. The simulative results with the optimal controller and with a conventional controller show that the performance of the optimal power control system is largely improved on dynamic characters. The method applied here not only can be used for research nuclear reactor but also can be easily extended to pressurized water reactor power plant and other fields.     

HIGH‐DIMENSIONAL LEARNING FRAMEWORK FOR ADAPTIVE DOCUMENT FILTERING*

We investigate the unique requirements of the adaptive textual document filtering problem and propose a new high‐dimensional on‐line learning framework, known as the REPGER (relevant feature pool with good training example retrieval rule) algorithm to tackle this problem. Our algorithm possesses three characteristics. First, it maintains a pool of selective features with potentially high predictive power to predict document relevance. Second, besides retrieving documents according to their predicted relevance, it also retrieves incoming documents that are considered good training examples. Third, it can dynamically adjust the dissemination threshold throughout the filtering process so as to maintain a good filtering performance in a fully interactive environment. We have conducted experiments on three document corpora, namely, Associated Press, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and Wall Street Journal to compare the performance of our REPGER algorithm with two existing on‐line learning algorithms. The results demonstrate that our REPGER algorithm gives better performance most of the time. Comparison with the TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) adaptive text filtering track participants was also made. The result shows that our REPGER algorithm is comparable to them.     

Position control of linear switched reluctance motors for high-precision applications

Most advanced manufacturing processes require precise motions for material transfer, packaging, assembly, and electrical wiring. To achieve precise linear motions, most of these high-performance manufacturing machines use X-Y sliding tables with permanent-magnet rotary motors and rotary to linear couplers. Though this method is the most widely used, it has disadvantages of low accuracy, complex mechanical adjustments, high cost, and low reliability. This paper describes the position control of a linear switched reluctance motor for high-performance motions in manufacturing automation. The proposed actuator has a very simple structure and it can be manufactured easily. There is no need for magnets and no limitation on the travel distance. The actuator is extremely robust and can be used in a hostile environment. A novel current-force-position lookup table is first developed to perform the force linearization. Then, a plug-in robust compensator using H/sub /spl infin// loop-shaping design is employed to improve the system robustness and the tracking performance. Experimental results of the motion system indicate that the system has fast tracking responses with good accuracy.     

On exploiting task duplication in parallel program scheduling

One of the main obstacles in obtaining high performance from message-passing multicomputer systems is the inevitable communication overhead which is incurred when tasks executing on different processors exchange data. Given a task graph, duplication-based scheduling can mitigate this overhead by allocating some of the tasks redundantly on more than one processor. In this paper, we focus on the problem of using duplication in static scheduling of task graphs on parallel and distributed systems. We discuss five previously proposed algorithms and examine their merits and demerits. We describe some of the essential principles for exploiting duplication in a more useful manner and, based on these principles, propose an algorithm which outperforms the previous algorithms. The proposed algorithm generates optimal solutions for a number of task graphs. The algorithm assumes an unbounded number of processors. For scheduling on a bounded number of processors, we propose a second algorithm which controls the degree of duplication according to the number of available processors. The proposed algorithms are analytically and experimentally evaluated and are also compared with the previous algorithms     

模型库管理系统的设计和实现*

模型库管理系统是决策支持系统的核心，其基本功能包括模型的定义、组合、存储和调用.该文介绍一个支持客户/服务器模式的模型库管理系统的设计和实现，在这个系统中，模型被视为程序模块，通过运用面向对象的方法进行组织以及对模型的远程和动态的透明调用提供支持，使实现的系统具有良好的动态可扩充性.同时,通过提供模型定义语言和模型库管理，便于决策支持系统客户软件的开发.     

Delivery of video mail on the World Wide Web

This study was initiated to examine the feasibility of providing multimedia mail, in particular video mail, on the existing World Wide Web platform. In this instance, the Web browser will act as the user agent of the mailing system. With this, users will be able to compose, send and read video mail directly on the Web. This paper examines a number of possible system architectures that can be employed for the development of video mail. Based on the following key issues: portability of system, flexibility of system, Internet standard support, security and authentication, and message compression and storage, a final architecture was selected to build video mail. The approach taken is that the system will be interfaced to the Web using a standard HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server and a standard Web browser. This is achieved through the use of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs and forms which reside in a standard HTTP server to provide the functionality of video mail, and a separate mail server for the storage and management of messages. This will cause the HTTP server to behave as if it is an electronic mail (E-mail) system. Video mail has been successfully implemented at the School of Applied Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The development work has been carried out on a Sun SPARC5 workstation and the Typhoon relational database system was used to construct the mail server. All software codes were written in C or C++. A video capturing application used in conjunction with a SunVideo card has been developed for video and audio recording. The paper also addresses implementation issues pertaining to the use of CGI programs, mail server development, and video and audio management.     

Extended latent class models for collaborative recommendation

With the advent of the World Wide Web, providing just-in-time personalized product recommendations to customers now becomes possible. Collaborative recommender systems utilize correlation between customer preference ratings to identify "like-minded" customers and predict their product preference. One factor determining the success of the recommender systems is the prediction accuracy, which in many cases is limited by lacking adequate ratings (the sparsity problem). Recently, the use of latent class model (LCM) has been proposed to alleviate this problem. In this paper, we first study how the LCM can be extended to handle customers and products outside the training set. In addition, we propose the use of a pair of LCMs (called dual latent class model-DLCM), instead of a single LCM, to model customers' likes and dislikes separately for enhancing the prediction accuracy. Experimental results based on the EachMovie dataset show that DLCM outperforms both LCM and the conventional correlation-based method when the available ratings are sparse.     

Optimization of photo‐aligned ferroelectric liquid‐crystal display under passively addressed driving

Abstract— A ferroelectric liquid‐crystal (FLC) passively addressed 64 × 64 display based on the photo‐alignment technique has been developed. The display matrix has dimensions of 33 × 33 mm², and the FLC layer thickness is about 5 μm. Asymmetric boundary conditions, when only one of ITO surfaces of the display matrix is covered with the photo‐aligning layer while another one is not, have been used for providing both high contrast ratio and steady multiplex operation. The electro‐optical performance of the 5‐μm FLC display is presented, including bistable switching in static operation, optimization in multiplexing operation, and gray‐scale generation.     

Bouc-Wen model parameter identification for a MR fluid damper using computationally efficient GA

A non-symmetrical Bouc-Wen model is proposed in this paper for magnetorheological (MR) fluid dampers. The model considers the effect of non-symmetrical hysteresis which has not been taken into account in the original Bouc-Wen model. The model parameters are identified with a Genetic Algorithm (GA) using its flexibility in identification of complex dynamics. The computational efficiency of the proposed GA is improved with the absorption of the selection stage into the crossover and mutation operations. Crossover and mutation are also made adaptive to the fitness values such that their probabilities need not be user-specified. Instead of using a sufficiently number of generations or a pre-determined fitness value, the algorithm termination criterion is formulated on the basis of a statistical hypothesis test, thus enhancing the performance of the parameter identification. Experimental test data of the damper displacement and force are used to verify the proposed approach with satisfactory parameter identification results.