From supply chains to demand networks. Agents in retailing: the electrical bazaar

A paradigm shift is taking place in logistics. The focus is changing from operational effectiveness to adaptation. Supply Chains will develop into networks that will adapt to consumer demand in almost real time. Time to market, capacity of adaptation and enrichment of customer experience seem to be the key elements of this new paradigm. In this environment emerging technologies like RFID (Radio Frequency ID), Intelligent Products and the Internet, are triggering a reconsideration of methods, procedures and goals. We present a Multiagent System framework specialized in retail that addresses these changes with the use of rational agents and takes advantages of the new market opportunities. Like in an old bazaar, agents able to learn, cooperate, take advantage of gossip and distinguish between collaborators and competitors, have the ability to adapt, learn and react to a changing environment better than any other structure. Keywords: Supply Chains, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Multiagent System.Postprint (published version

The applications of satellites to communications, navigation and surveillance for aircraft operating over the contiguous United States. Volume 1 - Technical report

Satellite applications to aircraft communications, navigation, and surveillance over US including synthesized satellite network and aircraft equipment for air traffic contro

Planner, Volume 10, Number 5 & 6, December-March 1996

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_news/3952/thumbnail.jp

Multi-Agent Actor-Critic with Hierarchical Graph Attention Network

Most previous studies on multi-agent reinforcement learning focus on deriving decentralized and cooperative policies to maximize a common reward and rarely consider the transferability of trained policies to new tasks. This prevents such policies from being applied to more complex multi-agent tasks. To resolve these limitations, we propose a model that conducts both representation learning for multiple agents using hierarchical graph attention network and policy learning using multi-agent actor-critic. The hierarchical graph attention network is specially designed to model the hierarchical relationships among multiple agents that either cooperate or compete with each other to derive more advanced strategic policies. Two attention networks, the inter-agent and inter-group attention layers, are used to effectively model individual and group level interactions, respectively. The two attention networks have been proven to facilitate the transfer of learned policies to new tasks with different agent compositions and allow one to interpret the learned strategies. Empirically, we demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing methods in several mixed cooperative and competitive tasks.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper at the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20), New York, US

Handling Massive N-Gram Datasets Efficiently

This paper deals with the two fundamental problems concerning the handling of large n-gram language models: indexing, that is compressing the n-gram strings and associated satellite data without compromising their retrieval speed; and estimation, that is computing the probability distribution of the strings from a large textual source. Regarding the problem of indexing, we describe compressed, exact and lossless data structures that achieve, at the same time, high space reductions and no time degradation with respect to state-of-the-art solutions and related software packages. In particular, we present a compressed trie data structure in which each word following a context of fixed length k, i.e., its preceding k words, is encoded as an integer whose value is proportional to the number of words that follow such context. Since the number of words following a given context is typically very small in natural languages, we lower the space of representation to compression levels that were never achieved before. Despite the significant savings in space, our technique introduces a negligible penalty at query time. Regarding the problem of estimation, we present a novel algorithm for estimating modified Kneser-Ney language models, that have emerged as the de-facto choice for language modeling in both academia and industry, thanks to their relatively low perplexity performance. Estimating such models from large textual sources poses the challenge of devising algorithms that make a parsimonious use of the disk. The state-of-the-art algorithm uses three sorting steps in external memory: we show an improved construction that requires only one sorting step thanks to exploiting the properties of the extracted n-gram strings. With an extensive experimental analysis performed on billions of n-grams, we show an average improvement of 4.5X on the total running time of the state-of-the-art approach.Comment: Published in ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), February 2019, Article No: 2

Judicial Incorporation of Trade Usages: A Functional Solution to the Opportunism Problem

Article 2 of the UCC directed courts to look to business norms as a primary means of interpreting contracts. Recently the new formalists have attacked this strategy of norm incorporation as a misguided one that will lead inevitably to significant error costs. Accordingly, they have embraced plain meaning as the preferred interpretive strategy. This article argues that the strategy of rejecting trade usages unless they are part of the express contract is too rigid. The rejection is premised on an overly narrow cost/benefit analysis that fails to account for the functional role that such usages may play in curbing opportunistic behavior and thereby increasing gains from trade and overall welfare. Plain meaning and incorporation must each be evaluated to see how each one can achieve the parties\u27 presumed instrumental goals of curbing opportunism - the hold-up game. Decision makers should also consider the particular reasons why parties failed to include the trade usages in their express contract. Some of the reasons for omission might argue for and some against norm incorporation. The incorporation decision should also depend on assessing the critical structural factors that make self-enforcement of trade practices possible. After proposing a taxonomy for assessing the normative issue of incorporation, the article examines the case law. It suggests that the divergences can be explained by whether invocation would achieve the parties\u27 functional goal of reduced opportunism. The article concludes by suggesting that the taxonomy suggested here helps to overcome some past objections to incorporation strategy

Wind power in the UK : a guide to the key issues surrounding onshore wind power development in the UK

This report is summarised in the Welsh language in 'Ynni gwynt : ateb eich cwestiynau'.This report is summarised in 'Wind power : your questions answered'.This report aims to help policy-makers and planners balance genuine local concerns with wider environmental and social needs, thereby allowing the benefits of renewable energy to be realised through careful design and consultation.Publisher PDFUpdated version. Previous version published May 2005

Property and Precaution

Property in land suffers from an unacknowledged precautionary deficit. Ownership is dispensed in standardized blocks of monopoly control that are routinely retained in their entirety until someone raises an issue regarding an actual or potential incompatible land use. This arrangement, which encourages owners to take sustained, unpriced draws against a limited stock of future flexibility, sets the stage for future impasse as inconsistent plans develop. It also makes property an unnecessarily accident-prone institution, given the role that bargaining failure plays in producing costly land use conflicts. Expanding the slate of potential precautions beyond owners\u27 locational and operational choices to include their choices about the strength and content of their own entitlements offers new traction on land use disputes. It also presents interesting institutional and theoretical challenges. In this essay, I propose using a local option exchange to confront owners with the opportunity costs of maintaining veto power over unused, low-valued rights. Enabling owners to relinquish property-rule protection of such rights before conflicts arise could make property more flexible and communicative, and hence reduce the costs of incompatible land uses. This approach requires rethinking the limits of customization in property bundles and the potential for owner participation in entitlement definition

Property and Precaution

Property in land suffers from an unacknowledged precautionary deficit. Ownership is dispensed in standardized blocks of monopoly control that are routinely retained in their entirety until someone raises an issue regarding an actual or potential incompatible land use. This arrangement, which encourages owners to take sustained, unpriced draws against a limited stock of future flexibility, sets the stage for future impasse as inconsistent plans develop. It also makes property an unnecessarily accident-prone institution, given the role that bargaining failure plays in producing costly land use conflicts. Expanding the slate of potential precautions beyond owners\u27 locational and operational choices to include their choices about the strength and content of their own entitlements offers new traction on land use disputes. It also presents interesting institutional and theoretical challenges. In this essay, I propose using a local option exchange to confront owners with the opportunity costs of maintaining veto power over unused, low-valued rights. Enabling owners to relinquish property-rule protection of such rights before conflicts arise could make property more flexible and communicative, and hence reduce the costs of incompatible land uses. This approach requires rethinking the limits of customization in property bundles and the potential for owner participation in entitlement definition

Irreversible and Catastrophic

As many treaties and statutes emphasize, some risks are distinctive in the sense that they are potentially irreversible or catastrophic; for such risks, it is sensible to take extra precautions. When a harm is irreversible, and when regulators lack information about its magnitude and likelihood, they should purchase an "option" to prevent the harm at a later date; the Irreversible Harm Precautionary Principle. This principle brings standard option theory to bear on environmental law and risk regulation. And when catastrophic outcomes are possible, it makes sense to take special precautions against the worst-case scenarios; the Catastrophic Harm Precautionary Principle. This principle is based on two foundations: an appreciation of people's failure to appreciate the expected value of truly catastrophic losses; and an understanding of the distinction between risk and uncertainty. The Irreversible Harm Precautionary Principle must, however, be applied with a recognition that irreversible harms are sometimes on all sides of social problems, and that such harms may be caused by regulation itself. The Catastrophic Harm Precautionary Principle must be applied with an understanding that in some cases, eliminating the worst-case scenario causes far more serious problems than it solves. The normative arguments are illustrated throughout with reference to the problem of global warming; other applications include injunctions in environmental cases, genetic modification of food, protection of endangered species, and terrorism.