14040267
Economic model of TAC SCM game
This work presents an economic model to the problem of supply chain management in trading agent competition (TAC SCM). The TAC SCM marketplace is characterized by the combination of quantity competition and price competition between manufacturers (agents). We specify the quantity competition by a variation of Cournot model and view the price competition as an extension of Bertrand game. An approach of smooth-regression is introduced to copy with the non-linear fluctuation of product price by using linear price model. The results of the paper provide the solutions to the decision-making problems in TAC SCM trading agent design, including daily production, product pricing and component procuring.
9693532
Negotiation mechanism for TAC SCM component market
This paper presents a new negotiation mechanism and a new supplier model for Trading Agent Competition Supply Chain Management(TAC SCM). Under the new negotiation mechanism, an agent is allowed to negotiate with component suppliers on price, delivery date and supply quantity while a supplier can autonomously vary its production capacity with market demands and allocate its products to buyers through auction. A mathematical analysis is given to ensure the new negotiation mechanism and supplier model effectively solve the existing problems while keeping most good features of the original TAC SCM game model.
1042778
Axiomatic Analysis of Negotiation Protocols
This paper presents an axiomatic approach to negotiation protocol analysis. We consider a negotiation procedure as multiple stages of mutual belief revision. A set of postulates in AGM-style of belief revision are proposed to specify rational behavior of negotiation. An explicit construction of negotiation function is given in which negotiation process is viewed as the interaction of two iterated revision operations. As a result the proposed axiomatic system is proved to be consistent. Finally, we examine our approach with an instantiation of Rosenschein and Zlotkin’s Monotonic Concession Protocol of Negotiation.
8370711
Consistency of Action Descriptions
As a contribution to the metatheory of reasoning about actions, we present some characteristics of the consistency of action theories. Three levels of consistency are investigated for the evaluation of action descriptions: uniform consistency, consistency of formulas and regional consistency. The first two provide an intuitive resolution of problems of explanation conflicts and fluent dependency. The concept of regional consistency provides for a measure of ramification. A highly expressive form of action descriptions, the normal form, is introduced to facilitate this analysis. The relative satisfiability of the situation calculus is generalized to accommodate non-deterministic effects and ramifications.
1234389
Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Multiple Belief Revision
The aim of the present paper is to reveal the interrelation between general patterns of nonmonotonic reasoning and multiple belief revision. For this purpose we de ne a nonmonotonic inference frame in which individual inference rules have been proposed in the literature but their combination as a system has not been investigated. It is shown that such a system is so strong that almost all the rules (including the supracompactness) suggested for nonmonotonic inference relations in the literature hold in it. We prove that this nonmonotonic inference frame is strictly correspendent with multiple belief revision operation. On the basis of this result we analyse a speci c paradigm of defult theory which satis es all the rules under consideration and discuss limitations of methods based on consequence relations for the study of nonmonotonic reasoning.
35603840
State Minimization Re-visited
A well-known circumscription policy in situation calculus theories of actions is to minimize the Abnormality predicate by varying the Holds predicate. Unfortunately this admitted counter-intuitive models. A different policy of varying the Result function eliminated these models. Explanations of how it did this are not entirely satisfactory, but seem to appeal to informal notions of state minimization. We reexamine this policy and show that there are simple justifications for it that are based on classical automata theory. It incidentally turns out that the description "state minimization" for the varying Result policy is more accurate than the original nomenclature had intended.
30422301
Web Taxonomy Integration Using Spectral Graph Transducer
We address the problem of integrating objects from a source taxonomy into a master taxonomy. This problem is not only currently pervasive on the web, but also important to the emerging semantic web. A straightforward approach to automating this process would be to train a classifier for each category in the master taxonomy, and then classify objects from the source taxonomy into these categories. Our key insight is that the availability of the source taxonomy data could be helpful to build better classifiers in this scenario, therefore it would be beneficial to do transductive learning rather than inductive learning, i.e., learning to optimize classification performance on a particular set of test examples. In this paper, we attempt to use a powerful transductive learning algorithm, Spectral Graph Transducer (SGT), to attack this problem. Noticing that the categorizations of the master and source taxonomies often have some semantic overlap, we propose to further enhance SGT classifiers by incorporating the affinity information present in the taxonomy data. Our experiments with real-world web data show substantial improvements in the performance of taxonomy integration.
205667500
FFT-based algorithms for the string matching with mismatches problem
The string matching with mismatches problem requires finding the Hamming distance between a pattern P of length m and every length m substring of text T with length n. Fischer and Paterson's FFT-based algorithm solves the problem without error in O(@snlogm), where @s is the size of the alphabet @S [SIAM-AMS Proc. 7 (1973) 113-125]. However, this in the worst case reduces to O(nmlogm). Atallah, Chyzak and Dumas used the idea of randomly mapping the letters of the alphabet to complex roots of unity to estimate the score vector in time O(nlogm) [Algorithmica 29 (2001) 468-486]. We show that the algorithm's score variance can be substantially lowered by using a bijective mapping, and specifically to zero in the case of binary and ternary alphabets. This result is extended via alphabet remappings to deterministically solve the string matching with mismatches problem with a constant factor of 2 improvement over Fischer-Paterson's method.
11522705
A supply chain network equilibrium model with random demands
Abstract In this paper, we develop a supply chain network model consisting of manufacturers and retailers in which the demands associated with the retail outlets are random. We model the optimizing behavior of the various decision-makers, derive the equilibrium conditions, and establish the finite-dimensional variational inequality formulation. We provide qualitative properties of the equilibrium pattern in terms of existence and uniqueness results and also establish conditions under which the proposed computational procedure is guaranteed to converge. Finally, we illustrate the model through several numerical examples for which the equilibrium prices and product shipments are computed. This is the first supply chain network equilibrium model with random demands for which modeling, qualitative analysis, and computational results have been obtained.
13991122
Multi-scale classification of 3-D objects
We describe an approach to the classification of 3-D objects using a multi-scale representation. This approach starts with a smoothing algorithm for representing objects at different scales. Smoothing is applied in curvature space directly, thus avoiding the usual shrinkage problems and allowing for efficient implementations. A 3-D similarity measure that integrates the representations of the objects at multiple scales is introduced. Given a library of models, objects that are similar based on this multi-scale measure are grouped together into classes. The objects that are in the same class are combined into a single prototype object. Finally, the prototypes are used for hierarchical recognition by first comparing the scene representation to the prototypes and then matching it only to the objects in the most likely class rather than to the entire library of models. Beyond its application to object recognition, this approach provides an attractive implementation of the intuitive notions of scale and approximate similarity for 3-D shapes.
6734225
Supply chain networks, electronic commerce, and supply side and demand side risk
In this paper, we develop a supply chain network model in which both physical and electronic transactions are allowed and in which supply side risk as well as demand side risk are included in the formulation. The model consists of three tiers of decision-makers: the manufacturers, the distributors, and the retailers, with the demands associated with the retail outlets being random. We model the optimizing behavior of the various decision-makers, with the manufacturers and the distributors being multicriteria decision-makers and concerned with both profit maximization and risk minimization. We derive the equilibrium conditions and establish the finite-dimensional variational inequality formulation. We provide qualitative properties of the equilibrium pattern in terms of existence and uniqueness results and also establish conditions under which the proposed computational procedure is guaranteed to converge. We illustrate the supply chain network model through several numerical examples for which the equilibrium prices and product shipments are computed. This is the first multitiered supply chain network equilibrium model with electronic commerce and with supply side and demand side risk for which modeling, qualitative analysis, and computational results have been obtained.