Nonpathological Lyapunov functions and discontinuous Carathéodory systems

Differential equations with discontinuous right-hand side and solutions intended in Carathéodory sense are considered. For these equations, sufficient conditions which guarantee both Lyapunov stability and asymptotic stability in terms of nonsmooth Lyapunov functions are given. An invariance principle is also proven.     

Bullwhip reduction for ARMA demand: The proportional order-up-to policy versus the full-state-feedback policy

A ‘proportional’ order-up-to policy reacting to ARMA demand is analyzed using stochastic optimal control theory. This policy is compared with a full-state-feedback order-up-to policy. Necessary conditions for an optimum of a weighted sum of the inventory and the ordering variances for both policies are formulated. Based on this a relatively simple expression for the ‘full-state’ policy is derived. The comparison between the two policies demonstrates that the ‘intuitively’ designed proportional policy does not fulfill the objective of controlling both the inventory and ordering variance for all parameter values of the demand model as well as the full-state-feedback policy. The full-state-feedback policy outperforms the proportional policy in several aspects.     

An empirical investigation of competency factors affecting e-business success in European SMEs

In the last decade there was growing interest in strategic management literature about factors that influence a company's ability to use IT. There is general consensus that knowledge and competency are necessary in developing an IT capability, but there is very little understanding of what the necessary competencies are, and how they influence IS usage in different contexts. The small and medium-sized enterprise context is particularly interesting for two reasons: it constitutes a major part of the economy and it has been relatively unsuccessful in exploiting e-business.     

Parameter identification for nonlinear systems: Guaranteed confidence regions through LSCR

In this paper we consider the problem of constructing confidence regions for the parameters of nonlinear dynamical systems. The proposed method uses higher order statistics and extends the LSCR (leave-out sign-dominant correlation regions) algorithm for linear systems introduced in Campi and Weyer [2005, Guaranteed non-asymptotic confidence regions in system identification. Automatica 41(10), 1751-1764. Extended version available at 〈http://www.ing.unibs.it/∼campi〉]. The confidence regions contain the true parameter value with a guaranteed probability for any finite number of data points. Moreover, the confidence regions shrink around the true parameter value as the number of data points increases. The usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated on some simple examples.     

An efficient controller structure with minimum roundoff noise gain

Based on a polynomial operator approach, a new sparse controller structure is derived, which is actually an improved version of the recently proposed structure [Li, G. (2004). A polynomial-operator-based DFIIt structure for IIR filters. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II, 51, 147-151]. The performance of the proposed structure is analyzed by deriving the corresponding expression of roundoff noise gain and the problem of finding optimized sparse structures is solved efficiently with a genetic algorithm (GA). A numerical example is given, which shows that the newly developed structure can achieve much better performance than some well-known structures and particularly outperforms the traditional optimal fully parametrized realization greatly in terms of reducing roundoff noise and implementation complexity.     

Physical design of the VCI wrappers for the on-chip packet-switched network named SPIN

This paper presents the physical design methodology of the VCI/SPIN wrappers. The challenge was the validation of the wrappers’ specification with Alliance CAD Tools.A wrapper is a standard gateway used by a subscriber to access an interconnect. Because there are as many wrappers as subscribers, it is relevant to have an estimation of the wrapper’s area, its frequency and then compare these results to the router’s.The interest to perform this study with academic tools is to show that commercial tools are not the unique way for experimentations.     

A rule-based approach for robust clump splitting

This paper presents a robust rule-based approach for the splitting of binary clumps that are formed by objects of diverse shapes and sizes. First, the deepest boundary pixels, i.e., the concavity pixels in a clump, are detected using a fast and accurate scheme. Next, concavity-based rules are applied to generate the candidate split lines that join pairs of concavity pixels. A figure of merit is used to determine the best split line from the set of candidate lines. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is robust and accurate.     

ID-based threshold decryption secure against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack

This paper proposes an identity-based threshold decryption scheme IB-ThDec and reduces its security to the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem. Compared with previous work, this conceals two pairing computations in the ciphertext validity verification procedure. The formal proof of security of this scheme is provided in the random oracle model. Additionally, we show that IB-ThDec can be applied to the threshold key escrow and the mediated cryptosystems.     

A region-based selective optical flow back-projection for genuine motion vector estimation

Motion vector plays one significant feature in moving object segmentation. However, the motion vector in this application is required to represent the actual motion displacement, rather than regions of visually significant similarity. In this paper, region-based selective optical flow back-projection (RSOFB) which back-projects optical flows in a region to restore the region's motion vector from gradient-based optical flows, is proposed to obtain genuine motion displacement. The back-projection is performed based on minimizing the projection mean square errors of the motion vector on gradient directions. As optical flows of various magnitudes and directions provide various degrees of reliability in the genuine motion restoration, the optical flows to be used in the RSOFB are optimally selected based on their sensitivity to noises and their tendency in causing motion estimation errors. In this paper a deterministic solution is also derived for performing the minimization and obtaining the genuine motion magnitude and motion direction.