A demand-driven approach for a multi-agent system in Supply Chain Management

This paper presents the architecture of a multi-agent decision support system for Supply Chain Management (SCM) which has been designed to compete in the TAC SCM game. The behaviour of the system is demand-driven and the agents plan, predict, and react dynamically to changes in the market. The main strength of the system lies in the ability of the Demand agent to predict customer winning bid prices - the highest prices the agent can offer customers and still obtain their orders. This paper investigates the effect of the ability to predict customer order prices on the overall performance of the system. Four strategies are proposed and compared for predicting such prices. The experimental results reveal which strategies are better and show that there is a correlation between the accuracy of the models' predictions and the overall system performance: the more accurate the prediction of customer order prices, the higher the profit. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Quantumness of correlations and Maxwell's demons in elementary scattering processes—Energetic consequences

The interactions between physical systems generally lead to the formation of correlations. In this paper we consider the phenomena of entanglement and "quantumness of correlations", such as quantum discord, with particular emphasis on their energetic consequences for the participating systems. We describe a number of theoretical models that are commonly employed in this context, highlighting the general character of one of their most intriguing results: In contradiction to conventional expectations, erasure (decay, consumption) of quantum correlations may be a source of work, i.e. may have "negative energetic costs". We report experimental evidence of this surprising effect obtained within the framework of an elementary scattering experiment, namely ultrafast neutron Compton scattering from normal-state liquid 4He. The general theory of quantumness of correlations provides a natural way of interpreting the reported results, which stand in blatant contrast to the conventional theory of scattering, where neutron-atom-environment quantum correlations and decoherence play no role. Moreover, they provide a new operational meaning of discord and related measures of quantumness

Partial Wave Analysis of Scattering with Nonlocal Aharonov-Bohm Effect and Anomalous Cross Section induced by Quantum Interference

Partial wave theory of a three dmensional scattering problem for an arbitray short range potential and a nonlocal Aharonov-Bohm magnetic flux is established. The scattering process of a ``hard shere'' like potential and the magnetic flux is examined. An anomalous total cross section is revealed at the specific quantized magnetic flux at low energy which helps explain the composite fermion and boson model in the fractional quantum Hall effect. Since the nonlocal quantum interference of magnetic flux on the charged particles is universal, the nonlocal effect is expected to appear in quite general potential system and will be useful in understanding some other phenomena in mesoscopic phyiscs.Comment: 6 figure

A Statistical Description of Molecular Dynamical Processes in Liquids. Application to FIR Absorption Spectroscopy

The basic physical concepts concerning the derivation and validity of the generalized fluctuation-dissipation theorem (FDT) as revealed in an earlier paper11 are discussed. It is shown that dissipation of irradiation within the framework of Kubo\u27s linear response theory is mainly due (i) to the short-time behavior of the coupling operator of a system with the irradiation field, (ii) to the spontaneous fluctuations concerning the statistical operator in the microscopic time scale, and (iii) to the explicit introduction of the coupling of the systems with the thermal bath in Kubo\u27s formalism, as proposed by van Vliet. As a result, the statistical operator becomes time dependent in the shorttime range. Within Kubo\u27s microscopic theory of irreversible processes the generalized FDT also delivers a microscopic interpretation of Prigogine\u27s theorem of minimum entropy production (TMEP)

DETERMINATION OF FAULT PLANE SOLUTIONS USING WAVEFORM AMPLITUDES AND RADIATION PATTERN

In the present work a modified version of the program FPFIT (Reasenberg and Oppenheimer, 1985) is developed, in order to improve the calculation of the fault plane solutions. The method is applied on selected earthquakes from short period waveform data in the Mygdonia basin (N. Greece) as recorded by the permanent network of the Seismological Station of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki during the period 1989-1999. The proposed modification of the FPFIT program was developed in order to minimize the derivation of multiple solutions, as well as the uncertainties in the location of Ρ and Τ axis of the determined fault plane solutions. Compared to the original version of FPFIT the modified approach takes also into account the radiation pattern of SV and SH waves. For each earthquake horizontal and vertical components of each station were used and the first arrivals of Ρ and S waves were picked. Using the maximum peak-to-peak amplitude of Ρ and S waves the ratio Pmax/(S/\/2max+SE2max)1/2 was estimated, where S/Vmax and SEmax are the maximum amplitudes of the two horizontal components (N-S, E-W) for the S waves and Pmax is the maximum amplitude of the vertical one for the P- waves. This ratio for the observed data, as well as the corresponding ratio Prad/iS/Aad+SlAad)1'2 of the synthetic data was used as a weight for the determination of the observed and theoretical P-wave polarities, respectively. The method was tested using synthetic data. A significant improvement of the results was found, compared to the original version of FPFIT. In particular, an improved approximation of the input focal mechanism is found, without multiple solutions and the best-estimated Ρ and Τ axes exhibit much smaller uncertainties. The addition of noise in the synthetic data didn't significantly change the results concerning the fault plane solutions. Finally, we have applied the modified program on a real data set of earthquakes that occurred in the Mygdonia basin

Letters

by S Gee, S Cotter, D O’Flanagan, on behalf of the national incident management tea

Early Component-Based System Reliability Analysis for Approximate Computing Systems

A key enabler of real applications on approximate computing systems is the availability of instruments to analyze system reliability, early in the design cycle. Accurately measuring the impact on system reliability of any change in the technology, circuits, microarchitecture and software is most of the time a multi-team multi-objective problem and reliability must be traded off against other crucial design attributes (or objectives) such as power, performance and cost. Unfortunately, tools and models for cross-layer reliability analysis are still at their early stages compared to other very mature design tools and this represents a major issue for mainstream applications. This paper presents preliminary information on a cross-layer framework built on top of a Bayesian model designed to perform component-based reliability analysis of complex systems