Emerging strategy recognition in agile portfolios

Agile practices become increasingly popular for projects and project portfolios offering firms a higher flexibility to adapt to dynamic environments. This study investigates the antecedents and consequences of agile practices' relevance for strategy formulation in project portfolio management processes. Building on complex adaptive systems theory, we hypothesize a positive relationship between agile capabilities and emerging strategy initiatives and eventually portfolio success. Agile capabilities refer to both the project portfolio organization's intensity of and competence in applying agile practices. Using a sample of 135 portfolios and multiple informants for each portfolio, the results support entrepreneurial orientation and voice behavior as antecedents for agile capabilities. Furthermore, the findings support an agile portfolio's positive relationship with emergence recognition and overall portfolio success. The findings contribute to the literature by identifying two significant antecedents of agile capabilities as well as empirically demonstrating the positive relationship between agile portfolios and emerging strategy recognition. For practitioners, the study encourages the application of agile practices by stressing the general positive influence of agile capabilities and underlines entrepreneurial orientation and voice behavior as important methods of empowerment for agile portfolio processes.     

A multi-start central force optimization for global optimization

Central force optimization (CFO) is an efficient and powerful population-based intelligence algorithm for optimization problems. CFO is deterministic in nature, unlike the most widely used metaheuristics. CFO, however, is not completely free from the problems of premature convergence. One way to overcome local optimality is to utilize the multi-start strategy. By combining the respective advantages of CFO and the multi-start strategy, a multi-start central force optimization (MCFO) algorithm is proposed in this paper. The performance of the MCFO approach is evaluated on a comprehensive set of benchmark functions. The experimental results demonstrate that MCFO not only saves the computational cost, but also performs better than some state-of-the-art CFO algorithms. MCFO is also compared with representative evolutionary algorithms. The results show that MCFO is highly competitive, achieving promising performance.     

A design of a robust discrete-time controller

In this paper, we proposed a robust discrete-time controller. This control system, which is derived from the idea of the normalized plant, does not include plant parameters. Thus, we obtain a control system independent of plant parameters and that has the same structure as a conventional optimal servo control system. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method is fairly robust to plant parameter variations and external disturbances.     

浅析火力发电厂汽水系统中内径管与外径管的设计选择

按照管道加工工艺的不同,管道可分为内径控制管和外径控制管。通过热轧工艺生产的外径控制无缝钢管,可满足火力发电厂汽水系统中绝大部分管道的使用要求。对于超(超)临界机组的主蒸汽和高温再热蒸汽管道采用的P91/P92材质的大口径厚壁无缝钢管,由于对材料性能和加工工艺有特殊要求,因此宜采用内径控制管。     

如何实施社会转型期的民办高校品牌战略

在社会转型期，面对日益激烈的市场竞争环境，如何制定民办高效发战战略，引导民办高效的可持续发展，是关系到民办高校兴衰的关键。本文主要从民办高校品牌战略入手，对社会转型及高等教育转型进行论述，并对如何加强民办高校品牌建设进行探讨。     

An enhanced anti-disturbance attitude control law for flexible spacecrafts subject to multiple disturbances

As well-known disturbance rejection methods, active disturbance rejection control and disturbance observer-based control can effectively improve the control performances of complex systems in the presence of disturbances. However, the accurate rejection of multiple disturbances for control systems of practical engineering, for example, the attitude control system of flexible spacecraft, is still a bottleneck problem. In order to further improve the anti-disturbance capability and reduce the conservativeness, this paper proposes a novel enhanced anti-disturbance control law for the attitude control system of flexible spacecraft by combining active disturbance rejection control and disturbance observer-based control in a unified framework. More specifically, the disturbance from flexible vibration is described by an uncertain exogenous system based on the partially known information including elastic damping ratios and modal frequencies. The disturbance observer-based control is utilized to estimate and thereby reject this disturbance. On the other hand, the other disturbances such as external environmental disturbance and complex model nonlinearity are merged into a equivalent disturbance with bounded derivative, which is compensated by using the active disturbance rejection control law. Stability and robustness analysis are carried out for the disturbance observer and extended state observer. Finally, simulation results of low-earth-orbit flexible satellite are presented to verify the effectiveness of proposed methods.     

高精度多环片自动装配控制技术

为了实现对微小环片零件的自动化装配,搭建了自动装配系统.通过4根直线导向轴与4个直线轴承来提高系统的导向精度和刚度.采用直线导轨进行各装配作业模块之间的切换,保证了微小环片零件的自动装配与取出.在环片的装配方向上,螺旋升降机和光栅尺实现环片的位置精度控制.在Lab VIEW编程环境中,采用分层软件架构和模块化控制思想,避免了不必要的数据循环检测与丢失,能够达到环片组件的装配精度要求.控制系统分为系统初始化模块、参数设置模块、装配模块和取出模块,自动装配系统通过各个模块间的相互交流配合完成装配任务.采用本文中自动装配系统装配环片的实验结果表明,环片零件装配的最大位置误差为26μm,垂直度误差为17μm,平均装配时间为75 s/片,可满足环片组件所需的精度要求.     

Inducing sustained oscillations in feedback-linearizable single-input nonlinear systems

The present paper concerns the induction of stable sustained oscillation in feedback-linearizable single-input affine nonlinear dynamical systems via continuous-time state feedback control. The proposed application-oriented control approach is based on the conception of a state feedback controller that ensures the tracking of a limit cycle characterized in terms of the feedback-linearized system. Boundedness and convergence of the closed-loop trajectories are established following the Lyapunov theoretical framework and applying LaSalle׳s stability principle. The proposed approach is demonstrated with computer-simulated control experiments, showing that it ensures the convergence of the state trajectories of the controlled system to a designed limit cycle and that the methodology can, in principle, be applied to any single input feedback linearizable system.     

A Distribution‐freeCUSUMChart for Monitoring Variability of AutocorrelatedProcesses

We present a distribution‐free tabular cumulative sum chart for monitoring the variability of an autocorrelated process. A quantity known as the asymptotic variance parameter is employed as a measure of the variability, and a distribution‐free tabular cumulative sum chart is applied to variance estimates calculated from batches of nonoverlapping samples. The proposed chart is applicable to a stationary process with a general marginal distribution and a general autocorrelation structure. It also determines control limits analytically without trial‐and‐error simulations. The performance of the proposed chart is tested on stationary processes with both normal and nonnormal marginals with various autocorrelation structures. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An iterative method for suboptimal control of linear time-delayed systems

This article presents a new approach for solving the Optimal Control Problem (OCP) of linear time-delay systems with a quadratic cost functional. The proposed method can also be used for designing optimal control time-delay systems with disturbance. In this study, the Variational Iteration Method (VIM) is employed to convert the original Time-Delay Optimal Control Problem (TDOCP) into a sequence of nonhomogeneous linear two-point boundary value problems (TPBVPs). The optimal control law obtained consists of an accurate linear feedback term and a nonlinear compensation term which is the limit of an adjoint vector sequence. The feedback term is determined by solving Riccati matrix differential equation. By using the finite-step iteration of a nonlinear compensation sequence, we can obtain a suboptimal control law. Finally, Illustrative examples are included to demonstrate the validity and applicability of the technique.