Reproductive Management of Dairy Cows with Particular Reference to Organic Systems

Reproductive efficiency is a major factor affecting production and economic efficiency indairy herds. In seasonally calving herds the requirement of good reproductive performance is of greater importance than in other production systems in order to maximally exploit the use of grazed grass in the diet of the cow. Reproductive performance of lactating dairy cows worldwide has declined over the past 30 years in association with selection for milk yield. There is increasing and consistent evidence to suggest that at least some part of the decline in cow reproductive performance is related to underlying changes in reproductive physiology caused by high milk production and or negative energy balance (NEB) in early lactation. Organic systems of milk production demand high tight seasonal calving patterns, maximal production from grazed grass, low involuntary culling rates and the continuous genetic improvement of the herd for commercially important traits. Organic milk production systems should also allow for replacement rates of 25% - 30% to ensure a young herd age structure and low somatic cell counts (SCC). The objective of this paper is to review the role of management factors in herd reproductive performance with particular reference to organic herds

A new adaptive response surface method for reliability analysis

Response surface method is a convenient tool to assess reliability for a wide range of structural mechanical problems. More specifically, adaptive schemes which consist in iteratively refine the experimental design close to the limit state have received much attention. However, it is generally difficult to take into account a lot of variables and to well handle approximation error. The method, proposed in this paper, addresses these points using sparse response surface and a relevant criterion for results accuracy. For this purpose, a response surface is built from an initial Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) where the most significant terms are chosen from statistical criteria and cross-validation method. At each step, LHS is refined in a region of interest defined with respect to an importance level on probability density in the design point. Two convergence criteria are used in the procedure: The first one concerns localization of the region and the second one the response surface quality. Finally, a bootstrap method is used to determine the influence of the response error on the estimated probability of failure. This method is applied to several examples and results are discussed

A coupled parametric and nonparametric approach for modal analysis of a satellite

This study takes place in the context of dynamical prediction for satellite structures. Aims of such studies are to survey the dynamical response of satellite equipment and components, to check that requirements are correct and to give prediction of vibration levels, which are inputs for the experimental test validation according to the launcher specification. This prediction is done by modal analysis performed on a numerical model built by finite element method. Uncertainties on equipment and components properties lead to random frequency response function (FRF). This paper aims at understanding how modal approach can be adapted to probabilistic framework in order to calculate cumulative density function or, at least, some quantiles of a FRF. Starting point of deterministic modal analysis is the study of a single degree of freedom (DOF) system. C. Heinkelé analytically expresses the probability density function (PDF) of the FRF of an oscillator with a random natural pulsation following a uniform law. We have generalized this work to random natural pulsation following a law of finite variance. Then, the expression of a FRF between two DOF of the structure is a linear function of random oscillators FRF and DOF components of random eigenvectors. Assuming that random eigenvectors are close to their means, we have access to the characteristic function of the random FRF between two DOF as a multi-dimensional integral with respect to the joint PDF of the oscillators FRF. This paper mainly focuses on two major points which are calculation of oscillators joint PDF and inversion of characteristic functions. The first one is tackled by copulas theory. Dependence structure of random eigenvalues are identified and modeled by a copula. Then we apply results on copulas transformations to obtain joint PDF of oscillators FRF. Classical results concern monotonic transformations but we extended these ones to non-monotonic cases. Concerning inversion of characteristic function, several methods are studied to numerically compute the Gil-Pelaez formula. This approach allows to access some FRF quantiles by numerical integration which error can be controlled. Moreover, an interesting point is the flexibility in the identification of the random eigenvalues PDF. This is especially interesting in order to couple parametric identification with nonparametric one, when only few dispersion informations are given for equipments, housed in the satellite primary structure

From Global to Local Fluctuation Theorems

The Gallavotti-Cohen fluctuation theorem suggests a general symmetry in the fluctuations of the entropy production, a basic concept in the theory of irreversible processes, based on results in the theory of strongly chaotic maps. We study this symmetry for some standard models of nonequilibrium steady states. We give a general strategy to derive a 'local' fluctuation theorem exploiting the Gibbsian features of the stationary space-time distribution. This is applied to spin flip processes and to the asymmetric exclusion process.Comment: minor changes, to appear in the Moscow Mathematical Journa

Determination of Bootstrap confidence intervals on sensitivity indices obtained by polynomial chaos expansion

L’analyse de sensibilité a pour but d’évaluer l’influence de la variabilité d’un ou plusieurs paramètres d’entrée d’un modèle sur la variabilité d’une ou plusieurs réponses. Parmi toutes les méthodes d’approximations, le développement sur une base de chaos polynômial est une des plus efficace pour le calcul des indices de sensibilité, car ils sont obtenus analytiquement grâce aux coefficients de la décomposition (Sudret (2008)). Les indices sont donc approximés et il est difficile d’évaluer l’erreur due à cette approximation. Afin d’évaluer la confiance que l’on peut leur accorder nous proposons de construire des intervalles de confiance par ré-échantillonnage Bootstrap (Efron, Tibshirani (1993)) sur le plan d’expérience utilisé pour construire l’approximation par chaos polynômial. L’utilisation de ces intervalles de confiance permet de trouver un plan d’expérience optimal garantissant le calcul des indices de sensibilité avec une précision donnée

Reliability approach in spacecraft structures

This paper presents an application of the probabilistic approach with reliability assessment on a spacecraft structure. The adopted strategy uses meta-modeling with first and second order polynomial functions. This method aims at minimizing computational time while giving relevant results. The first part focuses on computational tools employed in the strategy development. The second part presents a spacecraft application. The purpose is to highlight benefits of the probabilistic approach compared with the current deterministic one. From examples of reliability assessment we show some advantages which could be found in industrial applications

Resummation Improved Rapidity Spectrum for Gluon Fusion Higgs Production

Gluon-induced processes such as Higgs production typically exhibit large perturbative corrections. These partially arise from large virtual corrections to the gluon form factor, which at timelike momentum transfer contains Sudakov logarithms evaluated at negative arguments $\ln^2(-1) = -\pi^2$. It has been observed that resumming these terms in the timelike form factor leads to a much improved perturbative convergence for the total cross section. We discuss how to consistently incorporate the resummed form factor into the perturbative predictions for generic cross sections differential in the Born kinematics, including in particular the Higgs rapidity spectrum. We verify that this indeed improves the perturbative convergence, leading to smaller and more reliable perturbative uncertainties, and that this is not affected by cancellations between resummed and unresummed contributions. Combining both fixed-order and resummation uncertainties, the perturbative uncertainty for the total cross section at N$^3$LO$+$N$^3$LL$^\prime_\varphi$ is about a factor of two smaller than at N$^3$LO. The perturbative uncertainty of the rapidity spectrum at NNLO$+$NNLL$^\prime_\varphi$ is similarly reduced compared to NNLO. We also study the analogous resummation for quark-induced processes, namely Higgs production through bottom quark annihilation and the Drell-Yan rapidity spectrum. For the former the resummation leads to a small improvement, while for the latter it confirms the already small uncertainties of the fixed-order predictions.Comment: 30 pages + 17 pages in Appendices, 10 figures; v2: journal version; references added, discussed individual partonic channels for Drell-Ya