过程链管理--用于制定和管理转型组织的工具

在当今企业环境日益复杂而活跃的背景条件下，企业需要不断进行重组和迅速转型。这要求企业要具备更强的适应性和更高的灵活性。为了确保实现这些动态的要求，企业必须制定和实施新型的组织形式。本文介绍过程链管理——一种面向过程进行转型的工具。本文首先简要说明了过程链管理应用的工具、过程链管理的任务和构造。它的出发点是由行动、结构、资源、和指挥所组成的过程链管理。在第二步骤中，重点阐述了客户取向这个过程链管理中最重要的取向量。总体来说，整个价值创造链及与此相关的内部交换关系都具有重要意义。在对过程链管理的方法进行了说明以后，提出了一个应用实例，该实例不仅描述了垂直重构，也对水平重构进行了描述。     

Slip Control System for a Deep-Sea Mining Machine

Tracked vehicles capable of locomotion in the deep sea are used for manganese nodule mining. This requires specific technical solutions in various respects. Locomotion in the soft sea bed is one of them. For the Crawler to safely maneuver, an automatic drive mode with slip control of the driving tracks is essential. Based on experimental studies at IKS, University of Siegen, slip control for the NIOT-IKS mining machine has been developed and implemented. The experimental setup for the development of the slip control along with the logic of the automatic driving mode is described. The system is critically discussed and the test results and future work are briefly outlined. Note to Practitioners-The work is carried out as part of the polymetallic nodule mining program of the Government of India. The technique of slip control is a specific requirement for a tracked vehicle used in the deep sea. Slip is common in many vehicles-tracked and otherwise. Examples are steam engines in the early days and ordinary cars while negotiating slush or snow/ice and dozers working in soft soil. While these are manually controlled by drivers who have firsthand knowledge of the environmental conditions, in the case of a mining machine in deep sea, it has to be completely automatic and, hence, is challenging. The knowledge generated in this work could be effectively used by practitioners in other related areas of automobile engineering for updating their expertise. Also, similar techniques may be used for maneuvering vehicles sent to other planets     

Parallel reduced area multipliers

As developed by Wallace and Dadda, a method for high-speed, parallel multiplication is to generate a matrix of partial products and then reduce the partial products to two numbers whose sum is equal to the final product. The resulting two numbers are then summed using a fast carry-propagate adder. This paper presents Reduced Area multipliers, which employ a modified reduction scheme that results in fewer components and less interconnect overhead than either Wallace or Dadda multipliers. This reduction scheme is especially useful for pipelined multipliers, because it minimizes the number of latches required in the reduction of the partial products. The reduction scheme can be applied to either unsigned (sign-magnitude) or two's complement numbers. Equations are given for determining the number of components and a method is presented for estimating the interconnect overhead for Wallace, Dadda, and Reduced Area multipliers. Area estimates indicate that for non-pipelined multipliers, the reduction in area achieved with Reduced Area multipliers ranges from 3.7 to 6.6 percent relative to Dadda multipliers, and from 3.8 to 8.4 percent relative to Wallace multipliers. For fully pipelined multipliers, the reduction in area ranges from 15.1 to 33.6 percent relative to Dadda multipliers, and from 2.9 to 9.0 percent relative to Wallace multipliers.     

Cost effective second generation AC-modules: Development and testing aspects

In the framework of the European research project PV2GO, a new AC-module inverter was developed, taking into account all relevant aspects from a European market's point of view (standards, market, application, and research and development goals). The project goal was to achieve the overall system costs of 3 Euro per Wp for a modular plug-and-play photovoltaic system. For the photovoltaic-module, a standard 130-Wp Eurosolare module was chosen. The research and development (R&D) goal was to develop an advanced DC-control system consisting of a state-of-the-art programmable digital device and an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) for the AC-control of the inverter. According to the topology concept, thermal and magnetic designs were optimized with regard to production technology and packaging for large-scale production. The new AC-modules were tested in a number of field-test sites in various parts of Europe and their reliability was assessed through Highly Accelerated Stress Tests. Efficiency and power quality have been tested in the laboratory. Further in the PV2GO project an optimization study of the manufacturing process of the new generation of AC-modules for high volume output was done. Another task was the pre-certification procedure to assure compliance with the European guidelines and standards.     

Templating of crystallization and shear-induced self-assembly of single-wall carbon nanotubes in a polymer-nanocomposite

We report the appearance of a novel self-assembling of a fraction of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) within a SWCNT-polymer nanocomposite subjected to flow fields upon injection molding processing. By combining X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy techniques, both working on a microfocus fashion, we probe that a fraction of the thinnest SWCNT self-assembles into a rectangular lattice in the sample regions where the shear stress induces the highest levels of nanotube aggregation. Additionally, we demonstrate that a modest amount in weight of nanotubes is enough to template the morphology of crystallization during flow providing a method to obtain a highly desirable fiber-like morphology.     

View-based propagator derivation

When implementing a propagator for a constraint, one must decide about variants: When implementing min, should one also implement max? Should one implement linear constraints both with unit and non-unit coefficients? Constraint variants are ubiquitous: implementing them requires considerable (if not prohibitive) effort and decreases maintainability, but will deliver better performance than resorting to constraint decomposition. This paper shows how to use views to derive propagator variants, combining the efficiency of dedicated propagator implementations with the simplicity and effortlessness of decomposition. A model for views and derived propagators is introduced. Derived propagators are proved to be perfect in that they inherit essential properties such as correctness and domain and bounds consistency. Techniques for systematically deriving propagators such as transformation, generalization, specialization, and type conversion are developed. The paper introduces an implementation architecture for views that is independent of the underlying constraint programming system. A detailed evaluation of views implemented in Gecode shows that derived propagators are efficient and that views often incur no overhead. Views have proven essential for implementing Gecode, substantially reducing the amount of code that needs to be written and maintained.     

Statistical relational learning of trust

The learning of trust and distrust is a crucial aspect of social interaction among autonomous, mentally-opaque agents. In this work, we address the learning of trust based on past observations and context information. We argue that from the truster’s point of view trust is best expressed as one of several relations that exist between the agent to be trusted (trustee) and the state of the environment. Besides attributes expressing trustworthiness, additional relations might describe commitments made by the trustee with regard to the current situation, like: a seller offers a certain price for a specific product. We show how to implement and learn context-sensitive trust using statistical relational learning in form of a Dirichlet process mixture model called Infinite Hidden Relational Trust Model (IHRTM). The practicability and effectiveness of our approach is evaluated empirically on user-ratings gathered from eBay. Our results suggest that (i) the inherent clustering achieved in the algorithm allows the truster to characterize the structure of a trust-situation and provides meaningful trust assessments; (ii) utilizing the collaborative filtering effect associated with relational data does improve trust assessment performance; (iii) by learning faster and transferring knowledge more effectively we improve cold start performance and can cope better with dynamic behavior in open multiagent systems. The later is demonstrated with interactions recorded from a strategic two-player negotiation scenario.