Formal modelling of organisational goals based on performance indicators

Every organisation exists or is created for the achievement of one or more goals. To ensure continued success, the organisation should monitor its performance with respect to the formulated goals. In practice the performance of an organisation is often evaluated by estimating its performance indicators. In most existing approaches for organisation modelling the relation between performance indicators and goals remains implicit. This paper proposes a formal framework for modelling goals based on performance indicators and defines mechanisms for establishing goal satisfaction, which enable evaluation of organisational performance. Methodological and analysis issues related to goals are also discussed in the paper. The described framework is a part of a general framework for organisation modelling and analysis.     

Using standards to integrate soft real-time components into dynamic distributed architectures

A pervasive application domain today is one in which independently developed real-time components participate in a dynamic and decentralized way from distributed environments. Several challenges arise from this domain, related with participant heterogeneity, transient behavior, scalability or quality of service. The use of standards is important here, where a multidiscipline approach is required. We propose ServiceDDS, a framework that combines different standard technologies to solve the problems related with the integration of components into the described environment. ServiceDDS is based on DDS to support dynamic distributed interactions, XMPP to provide Web access, and RTSJ for real-time performance.     

Automatic parallelisation for LTI MIMO state space systems using FPGAs. An optimisation for cost & performance

The parallelism attained by the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) has shown remarkable potential for accelerating control systems applications. This comes at a time when well established methods based on inherited serial Central Processor Units (CPUs) cannot guarantee solutions for the increasing execution speed demands. However, the transition from serial to parallel architectures represents a tremendous challenge due to overwhelming numbers of unexplored options and conflicting factors. The work presented achieves a parallelisation characterisation for generic MIMO systems using stand-alone FPGA implementations. The main contribution is that a very fine subset of possible serial/parallel implementations is obtained. This is used to achieve a flexible trade-off between cost and performance. Automatic optimisation of latency, occupied FPGA area and execution speed is attained and justified in respect to most of the feasible scenarios.     

Performance evaluation of priority CSMA-CA mechanism on ISA100.11a wireless network

The International Society of Automation recently released ISA100.11a as an open standard for reliable wireless networks for industrial automation. ISA100.11a uses the TDMA scheme in the medium access layer to provide deterministic services. However, ISA100.11a adopts the CSMA-CA mechanism with priorities for retransmission from failure on dedicated links, sporadic data, and network configuration.This paper evaluates ISA100.11a CSMA-CA by simulation, considering the effects of backoff procedures and priority settings to probability of collision and successful use of slots. It's demonstrated that a high number of priority classes enable better network utilization resulting in less number of packets exceeding their lifetime.     

A global localization approach based on Line-segment Relation Matching technique

This paper presents a novel global localization approach for mobile robots by exploring line-segment features in any structured environment. The main contribution of this paper is an effective data association approach, the Line-segment Relation Matching (LRM) technique, which is based on a generation and exploration of an Interpretation Tree (IT). A new representation of geometric patterns of line-segments is proposed for the first time, which is called as Relation Table. It contains relative geometric positions of every line-segment respect to the others (or itself) in a coordinate-frame independent sense. Based on that, a Relation-Table-constraint is applied to minimize the searching space of IT therefore greatly reducing the processing time of LRM. The Least Square algorithm is further applied to estimate the robot pose using matched line-segment pairs. Then a global localization system can be realized based on our LRM technique integrated with a hypothesis tracking framework which is able to handle pose ambiguity. Sufficient simulations were specially designed and carried out indicating both pluses and minuses of our system compared with former methods. We also presented the practical experiments illustrating that our approach has a high robustness against uncertainties from sensor occlusions and extraneous observation in a highly dynamic environment. Additionally our system was demonstrated to easily deal with initialization and have the ability of quick recovery from a localization failure.     

Bacteria foraging optimization for protein sequence analysis on the grid

Scientific applications such as protein sequence analysis require a coordination of resources. This is due to hundreds and hundreds of protein sequences being deposited into data banks by the research community which results in an extensive database search when one wants to find a similar protein sequence. This search becomes easier and the time taken is reduced when it is conducted in a grid environment implemented using the Globus tool kit. This paper proposes the use of Bacteria Foraging Optimization (BFO) for finding similar protein sequences in the existing databases. Usage of BFO further reduces the time taken by a resource to execute the user’s requests. Also, the resources utilized in the proposed method are better balanced compared to the existing scheduling algorithms. Also, it is found that the number of tasks executed is more compared to the existing algorithms even though there is a fall in the execution of tasks as the number of resources increases which might be due to network failure etc. The proposed BFO has been compared with the existing First Come First Serve (FCFS) and Minimum Execution Time (MET) scheduling algorithms and it has been found that the proposed BFO performs well compared to the existing algorithms in terms of makespan, resource utilization and minimization in the case of non-execution of client requests.     

Description of Structural Damage Caused by the Terrorist Attack on the Pentagon

On September 11, 2001, an airliner was intentionally crashed into the Pentagon. It struck at the first elevated slab on the west wall, and slid approximately 310?ft (94.5?m) diagonally into the building. The force of the collision demolished numerous columns and the fa?ade of the exterior wall, and induced damage to first-floor columns and the first elevated slab over an area approximately 90?ft (27.4?m) wide and 310?ft (94.5?m) long. None of the building collapsed immediately. The portion that remained standing, even after an intense fire, sustained substantial damage at the first-floor level.     

Adherence Across Behavioral Domains in Treatment Promoting Smoking Cessation Plus Weight Control.

The authors tested whether adherence to simultaneous health behavior changes was unitary or domain specific among 76 women who modified smoking, eating, and physical activity to accomplish smoking cessation plus weight control. Random-effects regression analyses showed that adherence to both smoking and diet plans declined linearly and covaried positively; their association tended to grow stronger over time. In contrast, physical activity plan adherence did not change over time and was unrelated to other domains. At the end of treatment, 65%, 30.5%, and 25% adhered well or excellently to smoking, diet, and activity treatments, respectively. Findings support both unitary and domain-specific aspects of adherence and suggest that among smokers, smoking and eating behaviors may have similarities unshared by physical activity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

SATCHMOREBID: SATCHMO(RE) with BIDirectional relevancy

SATCHMORE was introduced as a mechanism to integrate relevancy testing with the model-generation theorem prover SATCHMO. This made it possible to avoid invoking some clauses that appear in no refutation, which was a major drawback of the SATCHMO approach. SATCHMORE relevancy, however, is driven by the entire set of negative clauses and no distinction is accorded to the query negation. Under unfavorable circumstances, such as in the presence of large amounts of negative data, this can reduce the efficiency of SATCHMORE. In this paper we introduce a further refinement of SATCHMO called SATCHMOREBID: SATCHMORE with BIDirectional relevancy. SATCHMOREBID uses only the negation of the query for relevancy determination at the start. Other negative clauses are introduced on demand and only if a refutation is not possible using the current set of negative clauses. The search for the relevant negative clauses is performed in a forward chaining mode as opposed to relevancy propagation in SATCHMORE which is based on backward chaining. SATCHMOREBID is shown to be refutationally sound and complete. Experiments on a prototype SATCHMOREBID implementation point to its potential to enhance the efficiency of the query answering process in disjunctive databases. Donald Loveland, Ph.D.: He is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from New York University and taught at NYU and CMU prior to joining Duke in 1973. His research in automated deduction includes defining the model elimination proof procedure and the notion of linear resolution. He is author of one book and editor/co-editor of two other books on automated theorem proving. He has done research in the areas of algorithms, complexity, expert systems and logic programming. He is an AAAI Fellow, ACM Fellow and winner of the Herbrand Award in Automated Reasoning. Adnan H. Yahya, Ph.D.: He is an associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Birzeit University, Palestine. He received his Diploma and PhD degrees from St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University and Nothwestern University in 1979 and 1984 respectively. His research interests are in Artificial Intelligence in general and in the areas of Deductive Databases, Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning in particular. He had several visiting appointments at universities and research labs in the US, Germany, France and the UK. Adnan Yahya is a member of the ACM, IEEE and IEEE Computer Society.