1,230 research outputs found
Decomposition Based Search - A theoretical and experimental evaluation
In this paper we present and evaluate a search strategy called Decomposition
Based Search (DBS) which is based on two steps: subproblem generation and
subproblem solution. The generation of subproblems is done through value
ranking and domain splitting. Subdomains are explored so as to generate,
according to the heuristic chosen, promising subproblems first.
We show that two well known search strategies, Limited Discrepancy Search
(LDS) and Iterative Broadening (IB), can be seen as special cases of DBS. First
we present a tuning of DBS that visits the same search nodes as IB, but avoids
restarts. Then we compare both theoretically and computationally DBS and LDS
using the same heuristic. We prove that DBS has a higher probability of being
successful than LDS on a comparable number of nodes, under realistic
assumptions. Experiments on a constraint satisfaction problem and an
optimization problem show that DBS is indeed very effective if compared to LDS.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures. LIA Technical Report LIA00203, University of
Bologna, 200
Peers and delinquency among girls and boys: Are sex differences in delinquency explained by peer factors?
Bubble size prediction in co-flowing streams
In this paper, the size of bubbles formed through the breakup of a gaseous
jet in a co-axial microfluidic device is derived. The gaseous jet surrounded by
a co-flowing liquid stream breaks up into monodisperse microbubbles and the
size of the bubbles is determined by the radius of the inner gas jet and the
bubble formation frequency. We obtain the radius of the gas jet by solving the
Navier-Stokes equations for low Reynolds number flows and by minimization of
the dissipation energy. The prediction of the bubble size is based on the
system's control parameters only, i.e. the inner gas flow rate , the outer
liquid flow rate , and the tube radius . For a very low gas-to-liquid
flow rate ratio () the bubble radius scales as , independently of the inner to outer viscosity
ratio and of the type of the velocity profile in the gas, which
can be either flat or parabolic, depending on whether high-molecular-weight
surfactants cover the gas-liquid interface or not. However, in the case in
which the gas velocity profiles are parabolic and the viscosity ratio is
sufficiently low, i.e. , the bubble diameter scales as
, with smaller than 1/2
- …