Agent-based negotiation and decision making for dynamic supply chain formation

Modern businesses are facing the challenge of effectively coordinating their supply chains from upstream to downstream services. It is a complex problem to search, schedule, and coordinate a set of services from a large number of service resources under various constraints and uncertainties. Existing approaches to this problem have relied on complete information regarding service requirements and resources, without adequately addressing the dynamics and uncertainties of the environments. The real-world situations are complicated as a result of ambiguity in the requirements of the services, the uncertainty of solutions from service providers, and the interdependencies among the services to be composed. This paper investigates the complexity of supply chain formation and proposes an agent-mediated coordination approach. Each agent works as a broker for each service type, dedicated to selecting solutions for each service as well as interacting with other agents in refining the decision making to achieve compatibility among the solutions. The coordination among agents concerns decision making at strategic, tactical, and operational level. At the strategic level, agents communicate and negotiate for supply chain formation; at the tactical level, argumentation is used by agents to communicate and understand the preferences and constraints of each other; at the operational level, different strategies are used for selecting the preferences. Based on this approach, a prototype has been implemented with simulated experiments highlighting the effectiveness of the approach.     

A blind watermarking method using maximum wavelet coefficient quantization

This paper proposes a blind watermarking algorithm based on maximum wavelet coefficient quantization for copyright protection. The wavelet coefficients are grouped into different block size and blocks are randomly selected from different subbands. We add different energies to the maximum wavelet coefficient under the constraint that the maximum wavelet coefficient is always maximum in a block. The watermark is embedded the local maximum coefficient which can effectively resist attacks. Also, using the block-based watermarking, we can extract the watermark without using the original image or watermark. Experimental results show that the proposed method is quite robust under either non-geometry or geometry attacks.     

Efficient identity-based online/offline encryption and signcryption with short ciphertext

The technique of online/offline is regarded as a promising approach to speed up the computation of encryption, because the most part of computation, such as pairing over points on elliptic curve and exponentiation in groups, can be pre-computed in the offline phase without knowing the message to be encrypted and/or recipient’s identity. The online phase only requires light computation, such as modular multiplication. In this paper, we propose two novel identity-based online/offline schemes: a full secure identity-based online/offline encryption scheme and an identity-based online/offline signcryption scheme. Compared to the other schemes in the literature, our schemes achieve the shortest ciphertext size in both offline and online phases and demonstrate the best performance in offline computation. Our schemes are applicable to devices with limited computation power. They are proven secure in the random oracle model.     

Optimization for limited angle tomography in medical image processing

This paper aims to reduce the problems of incomplete data in computed tomography, which happens frequently in medical image process and analysis, e.g., when the high-density region of objects can only be penetrated by X-rays at a limited angular range. As the projection data are available only in an angular range, the incomplete data problem can be attributed to the limited angle problem, which is an ill-posed inverse problem. Image reconstruction based on total variation (TV) reduces the problem and gives better performance on edge-preserving reconstruction; however, the artificial parameter can only be determined through considerable experimentation. In this paper, an effective TV objective function is proposed to reduce the inverse problem in the limited angle tomography. This novel objective function provides a robust and effective reconstruction without any artificial parameter in the iterative processes, using the TV as a multiplicative constraint. The results demonstrate that this reconstruction strategy outperforms some previous ones.     

铁路线路智能CAD(IRLCAD)系统中的三维景观动态仿真

铁路线路是大地上长大带状建筑物。自然环境和既有的人工建筑对线路走向的规划起着根本性的作用。在计算机上用三维景观动态仿真技术模拟现实环境,让工程师动态地对规划线路经行地区的环境进行观察和分析,从而作出线路走向决策,将是一种理想的设计境界。介绍了铁路线路智能CAD系统中的三维景观动态仿真技术。     

一个实用的面向中小型企业的产品数据管理系统

介绍了一个面向中小型企业的产品数据管理系统SMPDM。它是一个建立在PDM基本框架之上,集产品结构与配置管理、图档管理、工艺卡片管理及编码管理为一体的实用系统。它实施简单,见效快,是管理中小型企业产品数据的良好工具。     

Comparison of image reconstruction by using near‐field and far‐field data for an imperfect conductor

Image reconstruction by using near‐field and far‐field data for an imperfectly conducting cylinder is investigated. A conducting cylinder of unknown shape and conductivity scatters the incident wave in free space and the scattered near and far fields are measured. By using measured fields, the imaging problem is reformulated into an optimization problem and solved by the genetic algorithm. Numerical results show that the convergence speed and final reconstructed results by using near‐field data are better than those obtained by using far‐field data. This work provides both comparative and quantitative information. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 11: 69–73, 2001.