Baum and Stiles: The Silent Partners: Institutional Investors and Corporate Control; Austin: Proxy Contests and Corporate Reform; Rubner: The Ensnared Shareholder: Directors and the Modern Corporation

Byggbranschen står inför flera utmaningar eftersom vår medvetenhet om omgivningen ökar och ett mer hållbart förhållningssätt önskas. Ett byggprojekt är traditionellt begränsat av tid, kostnad och kvalitet men det har blivit ett måste att fokusera på miljöaspekter också. Att fokusera på miljöaspekter är en av de stora utmaningar som projekterings- och projektledare står inför i dag. Detta är en utmaning eftersom hållbart byggande kan uppnås på många olika sätt och projektledare har inte djup kunskap inom området. Ny kunskap behövs om till exempel miljöklassificeringar och långsiktiga fördelar med hållbart byggande. För att stödja design -och projektledare i sitt dagliga arbete använder många företag verksamhetssystem som ett verktyg för att lagra och dela kunskap. Systemet ska säkerställa att alla arbetar på rätt sätt och levererar lämplig kvalitet, men systemet bör också stödja de anställda i deras arbete. Konsulter behöver kunna ge råd, stöd och kontrollera de miljömässiga aspekterna av projekten. För att göra detta behöver de omfattande miljöledningsstöd från sitt verksamhetssystem. Denna studie är kvalitativ där intervjuer har genomförts och en enkät skickats ut till WSP’s projektledningsavdelningen i Stockholm. Författaren har gått in i verksamhetssystemet och observerat och kartlagt innehållet för att kunna föreslå förbättringar. Syftet med denna forskning är att undersöka hur ett verksamhetssystem kan stödja projekt -och projekteringsledare inom hållbarhetsfrågor. Genom att göra detta förbättras kunskapshanteringen. Resultaten tyder på att ett verksamhetssystem och miljöstyrningen bör integreras i ett system. Systemet måste vara snabbt och innehålla en effektiv sökfunktion för att förbättra tillgängligheten. Det måste finnas lämpliga verktyg som checklistor, mallar och riktlinjer för att utföra miljöuppgifter. Dessutom behöver de anställda tillräckliga kunskaper om hållbarhet för att kunna använda verktygen och lyckas bedriva hållbar projektledning. Det bör också finnas ett återkopplingsverktyg för de anställda som uppmuntrar dem att komma in med förslag och synpunkter som bidrar till kunskapsdelning i företaget

Timetabling in constraint logic programming

In this paper we describe the timetabling problem and its solvability in a Constraint Logic Programming Language. A solution to the problem has been developed and implemented in ECLiPSe, since it deals with finite domains, it has well-defined interfaces between basic building blocks and supports good debugging facilities. The implemented timetable was based on the existing, currently used, timetables at the School of Informatics at out university. It integrates constraints concerning room and period availability

FURY: Fuzzy unification and resolution based on edit distance

We present a theoretically founded framework for fuzzy unification and resolution based on edit distance over trees. Our framework extends classical unification and resolution conservatively. We prove important properties of the framework and develop the FURY system, which implements the framework efficiently using dynamic programming. We evaluate the framework and system on a large problem in the bioinformatics domain, that of detecting typographical errors in an enzyme name databas

Economic modelling using constraint logic programming

This paper investigates the use of constraint logic programming (CLP) in economic modelling through the design and implementation of two economic models. The first model, the Desai- Henry model contains only linear equations while the second model, constructed by the author, contains non-linear elements. In order to implement the second model, a non-linear constraint solver was constructed. This was necessary because, although CLP is a very powerful programming paradigm, currently available implementations lack any on-linear constraint solving mechanisms

A Monte Carlo model checker for probabilistic LTL with numerical constraints

We define the syntax and semantics of a new temporal logic called probabilistic LTL with numerical constraints (PLTLc). We introduce an efficient model checker for PLTLc properties. The efficiency of the model checker is through approximation using Monte Carlo sampling of finite paths through the model’s state space (simulation outputs) and parallel model checking of the paths. Our model checking method can be applied to any model producing quantitative output – continuous or stochastic, including those with complex dynamics and those with an infinite state space. Furthermore, our offline approach allows the analysis of observed (real-life) behaviour traces. We find in this paper that PLTLc properties with constraints over free variables can replace full model checking experiments, resulting in a significant gain in efficiency. This overcomes one disadvantage of model checking experiments which is that the complexity depends on system granularity and number of variables, and quickly becomes infeasible. We focus on models of biochemical networks, and specifically in this paper on intracellular signalling pathways; however our method can be applied to a wide range of biological as well as technical systems and their models. Our work contributes to the emerging field of synthetic biology by proposing a rigourous approach for the structured formal engineering of biological systems

Interaction of agents and environments

A new abstract model of interaction between agents and environments considered as objects of different types is introduced. Agents are represented by means of labelled transition systems considered up to bisimilarity. The equivalence of agents is characterised in terms of an algebra of behaviours which is a continuous algebra with approximation and two operations: nondeterministic choice and prefixing. Environments are introduced as agents supplied with an insertion function which takes the behaviour of an agent and the behaviour of an environment as arguments and returns the new behaviour of an environment. Arbitrary continuous functions can be used as insertion functions, and we use functions defined by means of rewriting logic as computable ones. The transformation of environment behaviours defined by the insertion function also defines a new type of agent equivalence--- insertion equivalence. Two behaviours are insertion equivalent if they define the same transformation of an environment. The properties of this equivalence are studied. Three main types of insertion functions are used to develop interesting applications: one-step insertion, head insertion, and look-ahead insertion functions

A general theory of action languages

We present a general theory of action-based languages as a paradigm, for the description, of those computational systems which include elements of concurrency and networking, and extend this approach to describe dist.ributed systems and also t,o describe the interaction of a system, with an environment. As part of this approach we introduce the Action Language as a common model for the class of nondeterministic concurrent programming languages and define its intensional and interaction semantics in terrors of continuous transformation of environment behavior. This semantics i.s specialized for programs with stores, and extended to describe distributed computations

A novel method for comparing topological models of protein structures enhanced with ligand information

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website through the link below. Copyright @ 2008 The Authors.We introduce TOPS+ strings, a highly abstract string-based model of protein topology that permits efficient computation of structure comparison, and can optionally represent ligand information. In this model, we consider loops as secondary structure elements (SSEs) as well as helices and strands; in addition we represent ligands as first class objects. Interactions between SSEs and between SSEs and ligands are described by incoming/outgoing arcs and ligand arcs, respectively; and SSEs are annotated with arc interaction direction and type. We are able to abstract away from the ligands themselves, to give a model characterized by a regular grammar rather than the context sensitive grammar of the original TOPS model. Our TOPS+ strings model is sufficiently descriptive to obtain biologically meaningful results and has the advantage of permitting fast string-based structure matching and comparison as well as avoiding issues of Non-deterministic Polynomial time (NP)-completeness associated with graph problems. Our structure comparison method is computationally more efficient in identifying distantly related proteins than BLAST, CLUSTALW, SSAP and TOPS because of the compact and abstract string-based representation of protein structure which records both topological and biochemical information including the functionally important loop regions of the protein structures. The accuracy of our comparison method is comparable with that of TOPS. Also, we have demonstrated that our TOPS+ strings method out-performs the TOPS method for the ligand-dependent protein structures and provides biologically meaningful results. Availability: The TOPS+ strings comparison server is available from http://balabio.dcs.gla.ac.uk/mallika/WebTOPS/topsplus.html.University of Glasgo