8997074
Applying Multi Agent Technology to Supply Chain Management
Supply Chain Management (SCM) is extremely important to the manufacturing and retailing industries. Profitability of enterprises in these two industries depends on the efficiency and effectiveness on they manage their supply chains. Information technology has been a key element in supporting supply chain management. As the access to the Internet becomes easier, managers are able to access real-time data and use decision support tools to support their decision making. In this paper, we investigate how multi-agent technology and constraint network can be integrated together to improve the efficiency and transparency of supply chain management. A multi-agent based supply chain management system has been developed to support communication, coordination, collaboration, and operation of different entities in supply chains. Which enabled the warehouses and plants to query and share information. A constraint network model has been applied to model the objectives and constraints of each entity in supply chains. Two experiments have been conducted to evaluate the usefulness and performance of the system with participation of a retailing firm. The results indicated that the proposed system has several benefits. For example, improve efficiency by saving time and efforts for decision makers as well as improve the quality and responsiveness of decision making by value-added services, such as, bullwhip detection agent.
15657957
Automatic Summarization of Chinese and English
As a result of the rapid growth in Internet access, significantly more information has become available online in real time. However, there is not sufficient time for users to read large volumes of information and make decisions accordingly. The problem of information-overloading can be resolved through the application of automatic summarization. Many summarization systems for documents in different languages have been implemented. However, the performance of summarization system on documents in different languages has not yet been investigated. In this paper, we compare the result of fractal summarization technique on parallel documents in Chinese and English. The grammatical and lexical differences between Chinese and English have significant effect on the summarization processes. Their impact on the performances of the summarization for the Chinese and English parallel documents is compared.
2566456
Interval constraint networks for tolerance analysis and synthesis
This paper proposes interval constraint networks and interval propagation techniques for automatic tolerance design. To develop an intelligent automatic tolerance design mechanism, the following interrelated problems are addressed: (1) representing the relationships between the tolerances of the entities, attributes, and the functional requirements of a design component by a constraint network, (2) developing tolerance propagation techniques in the network that will satisfy the constraints between the entities, attributes and functional requirement. For the purpose of tolerance design, we propose new definitions for consistency of constraints and consistency of a constraint network. New forward and backward propagation techniques achieve worst-case tolerance analysis and synthesis, respectively. A tank design problem illustrates the use of the procedures for tolerance analysis and synthesis. The discussion and examples compare the new constraint network and propagation techniques with previous works.
16166999
Automatic Construction of Cross-Lingual Networks of Concepts from the Hong Kong SAR Police Department
The tragic event of September 11 has prompted the rapid growth of attention of national security and criminal analysis. In the national security world, very large volumes of data and information are generated and gathered. Much of this data and information written in different languages and stored in different locations may be seemingly unconnected. Therefore, cross-lingual semantic interoperability is a major challenge to generate an overview of this disparate data and information so that it can be analysed, searched. The traditional information retrieval (IR) approaches normally require a document to share some keywords with the query. In reality, the users may use some keywords that are different from what used in the documents. There are then two different term spaces, one for the users, and another for the documents. The problem can be viewed as the creation of a thesaurus. The creation of such relationships would allow the system to match queries with relevant documents, even though they contain different terms. Apart from this, terrorists and criminals may communicate through letters, e-mails and faxes in languages other than English. The translation ambiguity significantly exacerbates the retrieval problem. To facilitate cross-lingual information retrieval, a corpusbased approach uses the term co-occurrence statistics in parallel or comparable corpora to construct a statistical translation model to cross the language boundary. However, collecting parallel corpora between European language and Oriental language is not an easy task due to the unique linguistics and grammar structures of oriental languages. In this paper, the text-based approach to align English/Chinese Hong Kong Police press release documents from the Web is first presented. This article then reports an algorithmic approach to generate a robust knowledge base based on statistical correlation analysis of the semantics (knowledge) embedded in the bilingual press release corpus. The research output consisted of a thesaurus-like, semantic network knowledge base, which can aid in semantics-based cross-lingual information management and retrieval.
15408418
CatRelate: A New Hierarchical Document Category Integration Algorithm by Learning Category Relationships
We address the problem of integrating documents from a source catalog into a master catalog. Current technologies for solving the problem deem it as a flat category integration problem without considering the useful hierarchy information in the catalog, or deal with it hierarchically but without a rigorous model. In contrast, our method is based on correctly identifying relationships among categories, such as Match, Disjoint, SubConcept, SuperConcept, and Overlap, which come from the relations of sets in Set theory. Compared with traditional Match/NotMatch relationship in literature, our approach is more expressive in defining the relationship. The relationships among categories are first learned in a probabilistic way, and then refined by considering the hierarchy context. Our preliminary experiments show that it can help to correctly identify category relationships, and thus increase the accuracy of document integration.
16831415
Automatic construction of English/Chinese parallel corpora
As the demand for global information increases significantly, multilingual corpora has become a valuable linguistic resource for applications to cross-lingual information retrieval and natural language processing. In order to cross the boundaries that exist between different languages, dictionaries are the most typical tools. However, the general-purpose dictionary is less sensitive in both genre and domain. It is also impractical to manually construct tailored bilingual dictionaries or sophisticated multilingual thesauri for large applications. Corpus-based approaches, which do not have the limitation of dictionaries, provide a statistical translation model with which to cross the language boundary. There are many domain-specific parallel or comparable corpora that are employed in machine translation and cross-lingual information retrieval. Most of these are corpora between Indo-European languages, such as English/French and English/Spanish. The Asian/Indo-European corpus, especially English/Chinese corpus, is relatively sparse. The objective of the present research is to construct English/ Chinese parallel corpus automatically from the World Wide Web. In this paper, an alignment method is presented which is based on dynamic programming to identify the one-to-one Chinese and English title pairs. The method includes alignment at title level, word level and character level. The longest common subsequence (LCS) is applied to find the most reliable Chinese translation of an English word. As one word for a language may translate into two or more words repetitively in another language, the edit operation, deletion, is used to resolve redundancy. A score function is then proposed to determine the optimal title pairs. Experiments have been conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed method using the daily press release articles by the Hong Kong SAR government as the test bed. The precision of the result is 0.998 while the recall is 0.806. The release articles and speech articles, published by Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited, are also used to test our method, the precision is 1.00, and the recall is 0.948.
14699908
Performance Analysis of Applying Replica Selection Technology for Data Grid Environments
The Data Grid enables the sharing, selection, and connection of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational and storage resources for solving large-scale data intensive scientific applications. Such technology efficiently manage and transfer terabytes or even petabytes of data for data-intensive, high-performance computing applications in wide-area, distributed computing environments. Replica selection process allows an application to choose a replica from replica catalog, based on its performance and data access features. In this paper, we build a Grid environment based on three existing PC Cluster environments and perform performance analysis of data transfers using GridFTP protocol over these systems. In addition, based on experimental results, it is proposed a cost model to pick the best replica, in real and dynamic network situations.
46346058
On Utilization of the Grid Computing Technology for Video Conversion and 3D Rendering
The present invention relates to an implant comprising two or more bone fragments that are combined to form a single unit. Cancellous bone or cortical bone is removed from a source and fashioned into bone components with desirable shapes and sizes. The bone components may be integrated to form implants for implantation in the body. Bone stock may be formed by combining sections of various bones of the body, and the bone stock may be further fashioned for use as implants with particular geometries.
9754310
A Simulation-Based Procedure for Expert System Evaluation
It is well recognized that the evaluation of the knowledge-based system is very important and difficult in the development of expert systems in the domains such as aviation and navigation. To alleviate some of the difficulties, and to reduce the development cost, the authors proposed an evaluating procedure based on simulation. The proposed procedure was designed to validate the functionality and capability of an expert system that was developed to provide decision-making support in ship navigation. In this paper, the developed expert system for collision avoidance is first outlined, and the procedure to evaluate the developed expert system by using a simulation-based approach is presented in details. It is also concluded that the simulation-based procedure is feasible and effective for evaluating expert systems in a number of different domains.
39638713
Robust H∞ fuzzy static output feedback control of T-S fuzzy systems with parametric uncertainties
This paper addresses robust H"~ fuzzy static output feedback control problem for T-S fuzzy systems with time-varying norm-bounded uncertainties. Sufficient conditions for synthesis of a fuzzy static output feedback controller for T-S fuzzy systems are derived in terms of a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). In comparison with the existing literatures, the proposed approach not only simplifies the design procedure but also achieves a better H"~ performance. Three drawbacks existing in the previous papers such as coordinate transformation, same output matrices and BMI problem have been eliminated. The effectiveness of the proposed design method is demonstrated by an example for the control of a truck-trailer system.
13803760
A bandwidth-based polling scheme for QoS support in Bluetooth
A flexible bandwidth management scheme namely Bandwidth-based Polling (BBP) for Bluetooth is proposed. A framing structure of time is defined in BBP, and the master allocates proper number of slots for each active slave in a frame. BBP allows the master to poll a slave more than once to achieve high flexibility for bandwidth allocation. The calculation of the polling time as well as the payload type for a slave is according to the bandwidth requirement of the slave and the limit of the frame size controlled by the master. Extension of BBP for supporting slaves with the SCO link and slaves without bandwidth requirement (best-effort slaves) is also proposed. Simulation results have shown the efficiency and fairness of BBP in bandwidth management. The flexibility of bandwidth allocation depends on the maximum polling time preset by BBP. A larger maximum polling time makes the higher flexibility of bandwidth allocation at the expense of a longer latency before reaching the equilibrium state. Analysis of the impact of the maximum polling time on bandwidth allocation is also presented in the paper.