Comparative study of different approaches to solve batch process scheduling and optimisation problems

Effective approaches are important to batch process scheduling problems, especially those with complex constraints. However, most research focus on improving optimisation techniques, and those concentrate on comparing their difference are inadequate. This study develops an optimisation model of batch process scheduling problems with complex constraints and investigates the performance of different optimisation techniques, such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Constraint Programming (CP). It finds that CP has a better capacity to handle batch process problems with complex constraints but it costs longer time

Semi-Supervised Learning for Neural Machine Translation

While end-to-end neural machine translation (NMT) has made remarkable progress recently, NMT systems only rely on parallel corpora for parameter estimation. Since parallel corpora are usually limited in quantity, quality, and coverage, especially for low-resource languages, it is appealing to exploit monolingual corpora to improve NMT. We propose a semi-supervised approach for training NMT models on the concatenation of labeled (parallel corpora) and unlabeled (monolingual corpora) data. The central idea is to reconstruct the monolingual corpora using an autoencoder, in which the source-to-target and target-to-source translation models serve as the encoder and decoder, respectively. Our approach can not only exploit the monolingual corpora of the target language, but also of the source language. Experiments on the Chinese-English dataset show that our approach achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art SMT and NMT systems.Comment: Corrected a typ

Closed-loop control of complex networks : A trade-off between time and energy

W. L. is supported by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grants No. 11322111 and No. 61773125). Y.-Z. S. is supported by the NSFC (Grant No. 61403393). Y.-C. L. acknowledges support from the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship program sponsored by the Basic Research Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and funded by the Office of Naval Research through Grant No. N00014-16-1-2828. Y.-Z. S. and S.-Y. L. contributed equally to this work.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Wigner Solution and QCD Phase Transitions in a Modified PNJL Model

By employing some modification to the widely used two-flavor Polyakov-loop extended Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model, we discuss the Wigner solution of the quark gap equation at finite temperature and zero quark chemical potential beyond the chiral limit, and then try to explore its influences on the chiral and deconfinement phase transitions of QCD at finite temperature and zero chemical potential. The discovery of the coexistence of the Nambu and the Wigner solutions of the quark gap equation with nonzero current quark mass at zero temperature and zero chemical potential, as well as their evolutions with temperature is very interesting for the studies of the phase transitions of QCD. According to our results, the chiral phase transition might be of first order (while the deconfinement phase transition is still a crossover, as in the normal PNJL model), and the corresponding phase transition temperature is lower than that of the deconfinement phase transition, instead of coinciding with each other, which are not the same as the conclusions obtained from the normal PNJL model. In addition, we also discuss the sensibility of our final results on the choice of model parameters

Time-resolved boson sampling with photons of different colors

Interference of multiple photons via a linear-optical network has profound applications for quantum foundation, quantum metrology and quantum computation. Particularly, a boson sampling experiment with a moderate number of photons becomes intractable even for the most powerful classical computers, and will lead to "quantum supremacy". Scaling up from small-scale experiments requires highly indistinguishable single photons, which may be prohibited for many physical systems. Here we experimentally demonstrate a time-resolved version of boson sampling by using photons not overlapping in their frequency spectra from three atomic-ensemble quantum memories. Time-resolved measurement enables us to observe nonclassical multiphoton correlation landscapes. An average fidelity over several interferometer configurations is measured to be 0.936(13), which is mainly limited by high-order events. Symmetries in the landscapes are identified to reflect symmetries of the optical network. Our work thus provides a route towards quantum supremacy with distinguishable photons.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Studies on some active components and antimicrobial activities of the fermentation broth of endophytic fungi DZY16 Isolated from Eucommia ulmoides Oliv.

Research into plant-derived endophytic fungi has grown in recent decades. Endophytic fungi still have enormous potential to inspire and influence modern agriculture. In this study, the endophytic fungi DZY16 isolated from Eucommia ulmoides Oliv. was tested for its bioactive components and antimicrobial activities using phenol-sulfuric acid method, high performance liquid chromatography method and growth inhibition measurements. The results show that variation trend of extracellular polysaccharide content at different growth stages of the strain DZY16 and the maximum content of extracellular polysaccharide was 2.02 g/L at the sixth day. Moreover, the fermentation broth of the DZY16 contained guanosine, uridine and adenosine; the contents were 1.54 mg/g, 1.07 mg/g and 1.36 mg/g respectively. On the other hand, the strongest antimicrobial activity was exhibited by the acetylacetate extract of strain DZY16 against Rhizoctonia solani and Gibberella zeae, showing 59.84 and 70.86% respectively. The strain DZY16 was identified by internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequence as belonging to Nigrospora. The results indicate that the endophytic fungi DZY16 of the plant E. ulmoides Oliv. is a promising source of novel bioactive compounds.Keywords: Eucommia ulmoides Oliv., endophytic fungi, extracellular polysaccharide, nucleotides, antimicrobial activityAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(15), pp. 1862-186