A semantic approach to a framework for business domain software systems

In enterprise firms, enormous amounts of electronic documents are generated by business analysts and other business domain application users. Applications that use these documents are often driven by business logic that is hard-coded together with application logic. One approach to the separation of business logic from applications is to create and maintain business and information extraction rules in an external, user-friendly format. The drawback of such an externalization is that the business rules, usually, do not have machine interpretable semantics. This situation often leads to misinterpretation of domain analysis documents, which can inhibit the productivity of computer-assisted analytical work and the effectiveness of business solutions. This paper proposes an ontology and rule-based framework for the development of business domain applications, which includes semantic processing of externalized business rules and to some extent externalization of application logic. The creation of external information extraction rules by the business analyst is a cumbersome and time consuming task. In order to overcome this problem, the framework also includes a rule learning system to semi-automate the generation of information extraction rules from source documents with the help of manual annotations. The main idea behind the work presented in this paper is to re-engineer very large enterprise information systems to adapt to Semantic Web computing techniques. The work presented in this paper is inspired by an industrial project.     

The role of the customer order decoupling point in production and supply chain management

In order to compete successfully, operations in any type of firm need to be strategically aligned to the market requirements. This concerns both manufacturing and supply chain operations. The customer order decoupling point (CODP) is getting increasing attention as an important input to the design of manufacturing operations as well as supply chains. This paper investigates the impact of the position and role of the CODP on issues of concern for production and supply chain management. The focus is on the design and strategic planning aspects of the supply chain, and the design of manufacturing planning and control systems. The paper proposes a dual design approach for production and supply chain planning systems; one type of system for operations upstream the CODP and another type of system for downstream operations in order to fully support the characteristics and objectives of each respective part of the supply chain.     

Spectral derivative feature coding for hyperspectral signature analysis

This paper presents a new approach to hyperspectral signature analysis, called spectral derivative feature coding (SDFC). It is derived from texture features used in texture classification to dictate gradient changes among adjacent bands in characterizing spectral variations so as to improve better spectral discrimination and classification. In order to evaluate its performance, two known binary coding methods, spectral analysis manager (SPAM) and spectral feature-based binary coding (SFBC) are used to conduct comparative analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SDFC performs more effectively in capturing spectral characteristics than do SPAM and SFBC.     

Comparison and improvement of tangent estimators on digital curves

Many contour-based applications rely on the estimation of the geometry of the shape, such as pattern recognition or classification methods. This paper proposes a comprehensive evaluation on the problem of tangent estimators on digital curves. The methods taken into account use different paradigms: approximation and digital geometry. In the former paradigm, methods based on polynomial fitting, smoothing and filtering are reviewed. In the latter case of digital geometry, we consider two methods that mainly rely on digital straight line recognition [J.-O. Lachaud, A. Vialard, F. de Vieilleville, Fast, accurate and convergent tangent estimation on digital contours, Image and Vision Computing 25(10) (2007) 1572-1587] and optimization [B. Kerautret, J.-O. Lachaud, Robust estimation of curvature along digital contours with global optimization, in: Proceedings of Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery, Lyon, France, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4992, Springer, Berlin, 2008]. The comparison takes into account objective criteria such as multi-grid convergence, average error, maximum error, isotropy and length estimation. Experiments underline that adaptive methods based on digital straight line recognition often propose a good trade-off between time and precision and that if precision is to be sought, non-adaptive methods can be easily transformed into adaptive methods to get more accurate estimations.     

Optimization methodology of dynamic data structures based on genetic algorithms for multimedia embedded systems

Modern multimedia application exhibit high resource utilization. In order to efficiently run this kind of applications in embedded systems, the dynamic memory subsystem needs to be optimized. A key role in this optimization is played by the dynamic data structures that reside in every real-life application. This paper presents a novel and automated way to optimize dynamic data structures. The search space is pruned using genetic algorithms that converge to the best multilayered data structure implementation for the targeted applications.     

Five decades of Computer-Aided Ship Design

This article will present a synoptical review of key developments in Computer-Aided Ship Design since its inception about five decades ago. Milestone events and major innovations will be identified in several categories of ship design application with the principal emphasis on the methodologies, the modeling and the integration of the ship design process. The discussion will address many specific subtasks of ship design on the common platform of a human-guided, computer-based decision process.     

A counterexample to “Generalized eigenvalue-based stability tests for 2-D linear systems: Necessary and sufficient conditions” by Fu, P., Chen, J., and S.I. Niculescu

We present a counterexample contradicting the equivalence of statements (i)-(ii) and (iii)-(v) of Theorem 1 of Fu, Chen, and Niculescu (2006).