Equilibrium clusters in suspensions of colloids interacting via potentials with a local minimum

In simple colloidal suspensions, clusters are various multimers that result from colloid self-association and exist in equilibrium with monomers.There are two types of potentials that are known to produce clusters: a) potentials that result from the competition between short-range attraction and long-range repulsion and are characterized by a global minimum and a repulsive tail and b) purely repulsive potentials which have a soft shoulder. Using computer simulations, we demonstrate in this work that potentials with a local minimum and a repulsive tail, not belonging to either of the known types, are also capable of generating clusters. A detailed comparative analysis shows that the new type of cluster-forming potential serves as a bridge between the other two. The new clusters are expanded in shape and their assembly is driven by entropy, like in the purely repulsive systems but only at low density. At high density, clusters are collapsed and stabilized by energy, in common with the systems with competing attractive and repulsive interactions.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Supervisor Localization of Discrete-Event Systems based on State Tree Structures

Recently we developed supervisor localization, a top-down approach to distributed control of discrete-event systems in the Ramadge-Wonham supervisory control framework. Its essence is the decomposition of monolithic (global) control action into local control strategies for the individual agents. In this paper, we establish a counterpart supervisor localization theory in the framework of State Tree Structures, known to be efficient for control design of very large systems. In the new framework, we introduce the new concepts of local state tracker, local control function, and state-based local-global control equivalence. As before, we prove that the collective localized control behavior is identical to the monolithic optimal (i.e. maximally permissive) and nonblocking controlled behavior. In addition, we propose a new and more efficient localization algorithm which exploits BDD computation. Finally we demonstrate our localization approach on a model for a complex semiconductor manufacturing system

Exact Outage Performance Analysis of Multiuser Multi-relay Spectrum Sharing Cognitive Networks

In this paper, we investigate the outage performance of dual-hop multiuser multi-relay cognitive radio networks under spectrum sharing constraints. Using an efficient relay-destination selection scheme, the exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions for the outage probability are derived. From these expressions it is indicated that the achieved diversity order is only determined by the number of secondary user (SU) relays and destinations, and equals to M+N (where M and N are the number of destination nodes and relay nodes, respectively). Further, we find that the coding gain of the SU network will be affected by the interference threshold $bar I$ at the primary user (PU) receiver. Specifically, as the increases of the interference threshold, the coding gain of the considered network approaches to that of the multiuser multi-relay system in the non-cognitive network. Finally, our study is corroborated by representative numerical examples