Studies on Ontology Meta-Model for Isomorphic Architecture of Information Systems based on Organizational Semiotics

Interoperability is hard to tackle in both business and IT domains since semantic transaction loss exists in terms of concepts transformation from one design stage to another in information systems development. It results from different interpretations and representations of various requirements in design domains. Without an explicit structural specification of semantic linkages among design domains, the transformation cannot be efficiently identified in an appropriate way. These call for effective architectural solutions that coordinate powerful technologies with business applications to enable seamless integration. The main objective of this paper is to investigate ontology types and build ontology meta-model for IAIS (Isomorphic Architecture of Information Systems) which was built in our previous work to reach seamless and unified semantic linkages. The ontology meta-model is proposed to bridge the gap among different processes in information systems development with the same structure unit. The secondary objective of this paper is to study how to prevent semantic loss in analysis and design processes with the meta-model

Does Daily Travel Pattern Disclose People’s Preference?

Existing studies normally focus on extracting temporal or periodical patterns of people’s daily travel for location based services. However, people’s characteristics and preference are actually paid much more attention by business. Therefore, how to capture characteristics from their daily travel patterns, is an interesting question. In order to address the research question, we first develop two basic measures in terms of repetitiveness of travel and then two advanced measures, to capture people’s activity of daily travel, and the colorfulness of lifestyle, respectively. Incorporating historical trajectories, with real-time positions from a location-based social network (LBSN), i.e. Foursquare, we conduct statistical analysis for people’s travel patterns in US cities. Finally, we illustrate people’s profiles of travel patterns and lifestyles. Results show that people’s preference can be inferred from the developed activity and colorfulness measures. Those findings demonstrate that proposed measures are supposed to be effectively adopted for researchers on travel pattern analysis and preference analysis, and further give suggestions to individuals for location-based decision making

Development of Downhole Motor Drilling Test Platform

AbstractThe Downhole motor is a kind of important rotary or percussive power drilling tool driven by high pressure mud. Drilling using downhole motor can reduce the energy consumption caused by the friction between long drill string and borehole, and reduce drill pipe wear. In this paper, some important drilling simulation experimental devices around the world have been studied, especially, two kind of drilling simulation experimental devices, the conventional bottom hole experimental device and high temperature and high pressure experimental devices have been analyzed respectively. At home and abroad, the typical drilling simulation devices include ZM-35, LST-10, LMT-I, M150, and Terra Tek, etc.. The characters, structures, principles and experimental methods of these typical simulation devices had been introduced in detail, which provides a reference for developing downhole motor testing and drilling process testing

Multi-objective ant colony optimization based on the Physarum-Inspired mathematical model for bi-objective traveling salesman problems

Bi-objective Traveling Salesman Problem (bTSP) is an important field in the operations research, its solutions can be widely applied in the real world. Many researches of Multi-objective Ant Colony Optimization (MOACOs) have been proposed to solve bTSPs. However, most of MOACOs suffer premature convergence. This paper proposes an optimization strategy for MOACOs by optimizing the initialization of pheromone matrix with the prior knowledge of Physarum-inspired Mathematical Model (PMM). PMM can find the shortest route between two nodes based on the positive feedback mechanism. The optimized algorithms, named as iPM-MOACOs, can enhance the pheromone in the short paths and promote the search ability of ants. A series of experiments are conducted and experimental results show that the proposed strategy can achieve a better compromise solution than the original MOACOs for solving bTSPs

Tumor abnormal protein as a promising biomarker for screening solid malignancies and monitoring recurrence and metastasis

BackgroundTumor abnormal protein (TAP), the sugar chain protein released by tumor cells during metabolism, allows the development of a technique that exploits aggregated tumor-associated abnormal sugar chain signals in diagnosing malignancies. Clinically, we have found that TAP detection can well predict some malignancies, but several physicians have not paid attention, and related studies have been minimal.MethodsWe evaluated TAP’s ability to distinguish between malignancies and benign diseases by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis and studied the possibility of monitoring malignancy progression by evaluating TAP levels in follow-up. We used Kaplan-Meier survival curves and Cox proportional hazard regression models to investigate the relationship between TAP and prognosis.ResultsTAP levels were higher in whole solid malignancies and every type of solid malignancy than in benign patients. ROC curve analysis showed that TAP levels aid in distinguishing between malignancies and benign diseases. TAP levels decreased in patients with complete remission (CR) after treatment and increased in patients with relapse from CR. Patients with metastases had higher TAP levels than non-CR patients without metastases. There was no difference in overall survival among patients with different TAP levels, and multivariate analysis suggested that TAP was not an independent risk factor for solid malignancies.ConclusionTAP is an effective screening biomarker for many solid malignancies that can be used to monitor the progression of malignancies but not to prognosticate

Electronic Waste Disassembly with Industrial Waste Heat

Waste printed circuit boards (WPCBs) are resource-rich but hazardous, demanding innovative strategies for post-consumer collection, recycling, and mining for economically precious constituents. A novel technology for disassembling electronic components from WPCBs is proposed, using hot air to melt solders and to separate the components and base boards. An automatic heated-air disassembling equipment was designed to operate at a heating source temperature at a maximum of 260 °C and an inlet pressure of 0.5 MPa. A total of 13 individual WPCBs were subjected to disassembling tests at different preheat temperatures in increments of 20 °C between 80 and 160 °C, heating source temperatures ranging from 220 to 300 °C in increments of 20 °C, and incubation periods of 1, 2, 4, 6, or 8 min. For each experimental treatment, the disassembly efficiency was calculated as the ratio of electronic components released from the board to the total number of its original components. The optimal preheat temperature, heating source temperature, and incubation period to disassemble intact components were 120 °C, 260 °C, and 2 min, respectively. The disassembly rate of small surface mount components (side length ≤ 3 mm) was 40-50% lower than that of other surface mount components and pin through hole components. On the basis of these results, a reproducible and sustainable industrial ecological protocol using steam produced by industrial exhaust heat coupled to electronic-waste recycling is proposed, providing an efficient, promising, and green method for both electronic component recovery and industrial exhaust heat reutilization

A new genetic algorithm based on modified Physarum network model for bandwidth-delay constrained least-cost multicast routing

A mobile ad hoc network is a kind of popular self-configuring network, in which multicast routing under the quality of service constraints, is a significant challenge. Many researchers have proved that such problem can be formulated as a NP-complete problem and proposed some swarm-based intelligent algorithms to solve the optimal solution, such as the genetic algorithm (GA), bees algorithm. However, a lower efficiency of local search ability and weak robustness still limit the computational effectiveness. Aiming to those shortcomings, a new hybrid algorithm inspired by the self-organization of Physarum, is proposed in this paper. In our algorithm, an updating scheme based on Physarum network model (PM) is used for improving the crossover operator of traditional GAs, in which the same parts of parent chromosomes are reserved and the new offspring by the PM is generated. In order to estimate the effectiveness of our proposed optimized scheme, some typical genetic algorithms and their updating algorithms (PMGAs) are compared for solving the multicast routing on four different datasets. The simulation experiments show that PMGAs are more efficient than original GAs. More importantly, the PMGAs are more robustness that is very important for solving the multicast routing problem. Moreover, a series of parameter analyses is used to find a set of better setting for realizing the maximal efficiency of our algorithm

Optimizing Livers for Transplantation Using Machine Perfusion versus Cold Storage in Large Animal Studies and Human Studies: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background. Liver allograft preservation frequently involves static cold storage (CS) and machine perfusion (MP). With its increasing popularity, we investigated whether MP was superior to CS in terms of beneficial outcomes. Methods. Human studies and large animal studies that optimized livers for transplantation using MP versus CS were assessed (PubMed/Medline/EMBASE). Meta-analyses were conducted for comparisons. Study quality was assessed according to the Newcastle-Ottawa quality assessment scale and SYRCLE’s risk of bias tool. Results. Nineteen studies were included. Among the large animal studies, lower levels of lactate dehydrogenase (SMD -3.16, 95% CI -5.14 to -1.18), alanine transferase (SMD -2.46, 95% CI -4.03 to -0.90), and hyaluronic acid (SMD -2.48, 95% CI -4.21 to -0.74) were observed in SNMP-preserved compared to CS-preserved livers. NMP-preserved livers showing lower level of hyaluronic acid (SMD -3.97, 95% CI -5.46 to -2.47) compared to CS-preserved livers. Biliary complications (RR 0.45, 95% CI 0.28 to 0.73) and early graft dysfunction (RR 0.56, 95% CI 0.34 to 0.92) also significantly reduced with HMP preservation in human studies. No evidence of publication bias was found. Conclusions. MP preservation could improve short-term outcomes after transplantation compared to CS preservation. Additional randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are needed to develop clinical applications of MP preservation