Des eaux indésirables : Montréal et ses eaux de surface, 1796-1840

Cet article retrace le passage à une nouvelle conception de l’aménagement du territoire municipal montréalais où les eaux de surface, d’abord perçues comme autant d’éléments et de phénomènes naturels et incontournables, peuvent et doivent dorénavant être chassées et évacuées, voire cachées (à l’intérieur de canalisations). Ce passage se produit au cours des premières décennies du xixe siècle, au moment où les préoccupations en matière de salubrité urbaine s’additionnent aux préoccupations en matière de circulation des gens et des biens. Ce passage est réalisé avec l’établissement d’infrastructures urbaines et la construction de travaux publics et tient de l’action publique locale. À terme, ces ouvrages qui visent à contrôler et à faire disparaître les eaux de surface permettent de poser un nouveau regard sur l’environnement de la ville mais imposent, en même temps, une nouvelle réalité environnementale.This article describes the transition to a new conception of municipal land use planning in Montreal, in which surface water, initially viewed as an unavoidable natural phenomenon, became seen as something that could and should be flushed out and drained away, even hidden (inside pipes). This transition occurred during the first decades of the 19th century, at a time when public health concerns were compounded by issues related to the movement of people and goods. Thanks to local public action, this transition was achieved through the development of urban infrastructures and public works. In the end, the work done to control and get rid of surface water provided a new way of looking at the urban environment, at the same time that it imposed a new environmental reality

Agent-Based Product Configuration: towards Generalized Consensus Seeking

This paper will present an evolution of a fuzzy agent based platform which performed products configuration. As a first step, we used the notion of consensus to establish robust results at the end of the configuration process. We implemented the concept of generalized consensus which implied the consideration of consensuses from the beginning, in this way robust data are treated during the entire process and the final result enables the designer to distinguish the robust components and flexible ones in a set of configurations.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, 5 table

Bias correction in multivariate extremes

The estimation of the extremal dependence structure is spoiled by the impact of the bias, which increases with the number of observations used for the estimation. Already known in the univariate setting, the bias correction procedure is studied in this paper under the multivariate framework. New families of estimators of the stable tail dependence function are obtained. They are asymptotically unbiased versions of the empirical estimator introduced by Huang [Statistics of bivariate extremes (1992) Erasmus Univ.]. Since the new estimators have a regular behavior with respect to the number of observations, it is possible to deduce aggregated versions so that the choice of the threshold is substantially simplified. An extensive simulation study is provided as well as an application on real data.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOS1305 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Des rues et des hommes : les commencements des politiques publiques locales en matière de travaux publics à Montréal, 1796-1840

En 1796, la réalisation des travaux municipaux de Montréal repose sur le système de la corvée. Lors de l’incorporation de la ville en 1840, le processus de « professionnalisation » du travail municipal est toutefois bien enclenché. Au cours de cette période, ce sont les travaux réalisés sur les rues qui occupent le plus intensivement les Montréalais. La rue devient un « objet » complexe. L’objectif du présent article est de mettre en lumière l’évolution des pratiques de gestion de l’institution publique locale, cela en prenant pour cas d’étude les transformations d’un objet essentiel à la ville. Nous démontrons que la réalisation des travaux publics, de la planification à la construction, prend graduellement le « chemin » de la professionnalisation : professionnalisation technique avec pour preuve les modalités de modernisation de la rue, mais aussi professionnalisation administrative des procédures d’adoption et de mise en oeuvre des projets.In 1796, the undertaking of municipal works projects in Montreal was conducted under a program of enforced labour. By the time of the city's incorporation in 1840, the process of professionalization of municipal work had become well entrenched. During this time, road work, in particular, occupied the attention of Montrealers. Roads became a complex object. The purpose of this article is to shed some light upon the evolution of municipal management practices, through the case study of road building. It shall be demonstrated that the undertaking of public works, in their planning and practice, gradually took the path of professionalisation: both in the professionalisation of techniques which led to better, more modern road construction, and in the professionalisation of administrative procedures and project mangement

FORMAL SPECIFICATIONS BUILDING FROM SPECIFICATIONS WRITTEN IN NATURAL LANGUAGE

International audienceMaking specifications is taking more and more time; every day an enormous quantity of pages which, for the most part, is written in natural language. However the need to reduce the time needed in the development of the services is a priority. One method is to formalise the maximum number of specifications received. With this in mind, we will try to demonstrate the possibility of a certain automation in the passage from the informal to the formal, by means of methods and proven tools, available to assist an expert in specifications. For this end we propose a process of formalisation which relies on an intermediary representation of the specifications with the formalism of conceptual graphs before arriving at a formal description in Z of the initial specification

Assistance to Agent-Based µ-Tools Development for a Co-operative Design Platform

International audienceWe report in this paper the assistance design of applications to actors of design process whom we call microtools (μ-tools). The μ-tools are well adapted to instrument the co-operative activities integrated in virtual spaces of the design. Those can be integrated on a software-agent platform (PLACID) adapted to the innovating and distributed design mechanical systems. The development of these μ-tools is a collaborative activity bringing together the future users and the developers. This collaboration is not always easy. Also, we try to propose possibilities of assistance throughout the development of the μ-tools, starting from the interactions and the natural expression of the various actors