The impact of the Rural Minimum Living Standard Guarantee(Rural Dibao)Program on child nutrition outcomes

The Rural Minimum Living Standard Guarantee(Rural Dibao)is an important unconditional cash transfer program to alleviate poverty in rural China.Despite the importance of children’s nutrition in breaking poverty cycles,little is known about the impact of Rural Dibao on child nutrition outcomes.Using China Family Panel Studies(CFPS),this paper examines the effects of Rural Dibao on child nutrition outcomes and investigates potential pathways and heterogeneous effects.We exploit propensity score matching and difference-in-differences techniques to evaluate the effects of the Rural Dibao program on child nutrition outcomes.Our results suggest that Rural Dibao significantly impacts the nutrition outcomes of children up to 15 years of age.Specifically,our results suggest that Rural Dibao improves child height-to-age z-scores by 1.05 standard deviations and lowers the probability of stunting by 11.9 percentage points.Additional analyses suggest that increased protein intake is the main pathway through which Rural Dibao participation contributes to better nutrition outcomes.We also find that the effect of the program is more pronounced among girls,children who are non-left-behind or live with highly educated mothers,and those from low-income families and poor areas.Our findings suggest that Rural Dibao participation helps improve child nutrition outcomes through improving diet quality.

Toward Trustworthy Decision-Making for Autonomous Vehicles:A Robust Reinforcement Learning Approach with Safety Guarantees

While autonomous vehicles are vital components of intelligent transportation systems,ensuring the trustworthiness of decision-making remains a substantial challenge in realizing autonomous driving.Therefore,we present a novel robust reinforcement learning approach with safety guarantees to attain trustworthy decision-making for autonomous vehicles.The proposed technique ensures decision trustworthiness in terms of policy robustness and collision safety.Specifically,an adversary model is learned online to simulate the worst-case uncertainty by approximating the optimal adversarial perturbations on the observed states and environmental dynamics.In addition,an adversarial robust actor-critic algorithm is developed to enable the agent to learn robust policies against perturbations in observations and dynamics.Moreover,we devise a safety mask to guarantee the collision safety of the autonomous driving agent during both the training and testing processes using an interpretable knowledge model known as the Responsibility-Sensitive Safety Model.Finally,the proposed approach is evaluated through both simulations and experiments.These results indicate that the autonomous driving agent can make trustworthy decisions and drastically reduce the number of collisions through robust safety policies.

Guarantee Strategy for the Safety of Agricultural Industry in Hunan Province

The safety of agricultural industry in Hunan Province shows an upward trend from"basically safe"to"very safe",but the state in the"safe"or"very safe"range is still unstable.In view of this,Hunan Province should guarantee the agricultural production ability,cultivate and enhance the core competitiveness of agriculture,firmly grasp the agricultural control power,attach importance to the export quality of agri-cultural products and other aspects to ensure the safety of agricultural industry.

Study on Urban Resilience Based on the Analysis of Supply Guarantee Facilities during Epidemic Closure—A Case Study of Shanghai in 2022

In the case of major public emergencies, the ability of cities to resist shocks becomes very important and reflects urban resilience. This paper selected the supply guarantee facilities during the city-wide lockdown of Shanghai during March-May 2022 due to COVID-19 pandemic as the research object. In this research, the per capita supply guarantee capacity and supply guarantee overlay intensity were analyzed based on the official list of facilities, and the actual role of the supply guarantee facilities was investigated through a public research questionnaire. The thermodynamic diagram map that was generated based on phone visits reflected the actual distribution of the population. Then the level of “supply guarantee resilience” was evaluated and graded for each district of Shanghai. It was concluded that the overall level of supply guarantee resilience was high in the central city, divergence in the near suburban districts, and generally low in the remote suburban districts. Based on this, the paper summarized the problems of supply guarantee revealed in Shanghai during the epidemic lockdown as well as proposed strategies to improve the resilience of similar scenarios in the future. With the help of big data and public research tools, this paper aimed to provide ways and methods to evaluate the resilience of cities under major public emergencies.

基于Assume-Guarantee搜索复用的C程序验证方法

提出了一种基于Assume-Guarantee搜索复用的验证方法,对C程序源代码进行验证.其思想是,在程序的每点处都引入一个保守假设条件,并假设从任意点出发,变量取值满足该点假设条件的所有执行路径都不会违背给定性质,然后根据这些假设条件遍历所有可能的执行路径以验证给定的时序安全性质,并在遍历的过程中验证这些假设条件是否满足,如果不满足,则不断对其精化和加强.验证方法总是在保证假设条件可靠的前提下尽量使用较弱的条件,使得大量的执行路径由于满足假设条件而可以搜索复用,从而降低验证代价.应用该方法验证了Linux操作系统中SSL协议的实现程序openssl-0.9.6c满足SSL协议的初始握手规范.实验结果表明,该方法具有良好的实用性和可扩展性.

The Present Situation of Chattel Guarantee System and Its Improvements—Taking the Angle of American Uniform Commercial Code(UCC)

Although there are appropriate stipulations for the chattel guarantees in the law of China, this guarantee system could not adapt to the request of economy's development because of the following reasons: the scope of chattel guarantees is narrow according to relevant stipulations; the transaction cost of the chattel is high; mortgage registration of chattel is in a mess; lack of efficiently executive guarantee system, etc. To counter the problems existing in the present Chinese chattel guarantee system, in this article, the author proposed some corresponding suggestions and countermeasures, hoping to perfect the chattel guarantee system in China.

Providing Guaranteed Network Performance across Tenants:Advances,Challenges and Opportunities

The varied network performance in the cloud hurts application performance.This increases the tenant’s cost and becomes the key hindrance to cloud adoption.It is because virtual machines(VMs)belonging to one tenant can reside in multiple physical servers and communication interference across tenants occasionally occurs when encountering network congestion.In order to prevent such unpredictability,it is critical for cloud providers to offer the guaranteed network performance at tenant level.Such a critical issue has drawn increasing attention in both academia and industry.Many elaborate mechanisms are proposed to provide guaranteed network performance,such as guaranteed bandwidth or bounded message delay across tenants.However,due to the intrinsic complexities and limited capabilities of commodity hardware,the deployment of these mechanisms still faces great challenges in current cloud datacenters.Moreover,with the rapid development of new technologies,there are new opportunities to improve the performance of existing works,but these possibilities are not under full discussion yet.Therefore,in this paper,we survey the latest development of the network performance guarantee approaches and summarize them based on their features.Then,we explore and discuss the possibilities of using emerging technologies as knobs to upgrade the performance or overcome the inherent shortcomings of existing advances.We hope this article will help readers quickly Received:Apr.07,2020 Revised:Oct.23,2020 Editor:Haifeng Zheng understand the causes of the problems and serve as a guide to motivate researchers to develop innovative algorithms and frameworks.

Decentralized robust guaranteed cost control for a class of interconnected singular large-scale systems with time-delay and parameter uncertainty

The decentralized robust guaranteed cost control problem is studied for a class of interconnected singular large-scale systems with time-delay and norm-bounded time-invariant parameter uncertainty under a given quadratic cost performance function. The problem that is addressed in this study is to design a decentralized robust guaranteed cost state feedback controller such that the closed-loop system is not only regular, impulse-free and stable, but also guarantees an adequate level of performance for all admissible uncertainties. A sufficient condition for the existence of the decentralized robust guaranteed cost state feedback controllers is proposed in terms of a linear matrix inequality （LMI） via LMI approach. When this condition is feasible, the desired state feedback decentralized robust guaranteed cost controller gain matrices can be obtained. Finally, an illustrative example is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Guaranteed Cost Consensus for High-dimensional Multi-agent Systems With Time-varying Delays

Guaranteed cost consensus analysis and design problems for high-dimensional multi-agent systems with time varying delays are investigated. The idea of guaranteed cost con trol is introduced into consensus problems for high-dimensiona multi-agent systems with time-varying delays, where a cos function is defined based on state errors among neighboring agents and control inputs of all the agents. By the state space decomposition approach and the linear matrix inequality(LMI)sufficient conditions for guaranteed cost consensus and consensu alization are given. Moreover, a guaranteed cost upper bound o the cost function is determined. It should be mentioned that these LMI criteria are dependent on the change rate of time delays and the maximum time delay, the guaranteed cost upper bound is only dependent on the maximum time delay but independen of the Laplacian matrix. Finally, numerical simulations are given to demonstrate theoretical results.

Delay-independent robust guaranteed-cost control for uncertain linear neutral systems

This article concerns the delay-independent guaranteed-cost control problem via memoryless state feedback for a class of neutral-type systems with structural uncertainty and a given quadratic cost function. New delay-independent conditions for the existence of the guaranteed-cost controller are presented in the term of LMIs. An algorithm involving optimization is proposed to design a controller achieving an optimal guaranteed-cost, such that, the system can be stabilized for all admissible uncertainties. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method.

Robust reliable guaranteed cost control for uncertain singular systems with time-delay

The robust reliable guaranteed cost control for uncertain singular delay systems with actuator failures and a given quadratic cost function is studied. The system under consideration involves constant time-delay and norm-bounded parameter uncertainties. The purpose is to design state feedback controllers which can tolerate actuator failure, such that the closed-loop system is stable, and the specified cost function has an upper bound for all admissible uncertainties. The sufficient conditions for the solvability of this problem are obtained by a linear matrix inequality （LMI） method. Furthermore, a numerical example is given to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach.

Guaranteed Cost Active Fault-tolerant Control of Networked Control System with Packet Dropout and Transmission Delay

The problem of guaranteed cost active fault-tolerant controller （AFTC） design for networked control systems （NCSs） with both packet dropout and transmission delay is studied in this paper. Considering the packet dropout and transmission delay, a piecewise constant controller is adopted. With a guaranteed cost function, optimal controllers whose number is equal to the number of actuators are designed, and the design process is formulated as a convex optimal problem that can be solved by existing software. The control strategy is proposed as follows： when actuator failures appear, the fault detection and isolation unit sends out the information to the controller choosing strategy, and then the optimal stabilizing controller with the smallest guaranteed cost value is chosen. Two illustrative examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. By comparing with the existing methods, it can be seen that our method has a better performance.

Guaranteed cost control with constructing switching law of uncertain discrete-time switched systems

A guaranteed cost control problem for a class of linear discrete-time switched systems with norm-bounded uncertainties is considered in this article. The purpose is to construct a switching rule and design a state feedback control law, such that, the closed-loop system is asymptotically stable and the closed-loop cost function value is not more than a specified upper bound for all admissible uncertainties under the constructed switching rule. A sufficient condition for the existence of guaranteed cost controllers and switching rules is derived based on the Lyapunov theory together with the linear matrix inequality （LMI） approach. Furthermore, a convex optimization problem with LMI constraints is formulated to select the suboptimal guaranteed cost controller. A numerical example demonstrates the validity of the proposed design approach.

Beaconless Position-based Routing with Guaranteed Delivery for Wireless Ad hoc and Sensor Networks

Existing position-based routing algorithms, where packets are forwarded in the geographic direction of the destination, normally require that the forwarding node should know the positions of all neighbors in its transmission range. This information on direct neighbors is gained by observing beacon messages that each node sends out periodically. Several beaconless greedy routing schemes have been proposed recently. However, none of the existing beaconless schemes guarantee the delivery of packets. Moreover, they incur communication overhead by sending excessive control messages or by broadcasting data packets. In this paper, we describe how existing localized position based routing schemes that guarantee delivery can be made beaconless, while preserving the same routes. In our guaranteed delivery beaconless routing scheme, the next hop is selected through the use of control RTS/CTS messages and biased timeouts. In greedy mode, the neighbor closest to destination responds first. In recovery mode, nodes closer to the source will select shorter timeouts, so that other neighbors, overhearing CTS packets, can eliminate their own CTS packets if they realize that their link to the source is not part of Gabriel graph. Nodes also cancel their packets after receiving data message sent by source to the selected neighbor. We analyze the behavior of our scheme on our simulation environment assuming ideal MAC, following GOAFR+ and GFG routing schemes. Our results demonstrate low communication overhead in addition to guaranteed delivery.

Nonfragile guaranteed cost control for Delta operator-formulated uncertain time-delay systems

With consideration that the controller parameters may vary from the designed value when the controller is realized, based on Lyapunov stability theory, a design method of nonfragile guaranteed cost control for a class of Delta operator-formulated uncertain time-delay systems is studied. A sufficient condition for the existence of the nonfragile guaranteed cost controller is given. A numeric example is then given to illustrate the effectiveness and the feasibility of the designed method. The results show that even if the parameters of the designed controller are of variations, the closed-loop system is still asymptotically stable and the super value of the cost function can also be obtained, while the closed-loop system will be unstable if the variations of the controller parameters are not considered when the controller is designed. The nonfragile guaranteed cost controller derived from the traditional shift operator method may cause the closed-loop system to be unstable, while the nonfragile guaranteed cost controller based on Delta operator method can avoid the unstable problem of the closed-loop system.

Delay-dependent guaranteed cost control for uncertain systems with both state and input delays

This paper considers the guaranteed cost control problem for a class of uncertain linear systems with both state and input delays. By representing the time-delay system in the descriptor system form and using a recent result on bounding of cross products of vectors, we obtain new delay-dependent sufficient conditions for the existence of the guaranteed cost controller in terms of linear matrix inequalities. Two examples are presented which show the effectiveness of our approach.

Optimal guaranteed cost control for fuzzy descriptor systems with time-varying delay

Based on the delay-independent rule, the problem of optimal guaranteed cost control for a class of Takagi-Sugeno （T-S） fuzzy descriptor systems with time-varying delay is studied. A linear quadratic cost function is considered as the performance index of the closed-loop system. Sufficient conditions for the existence of guaranteed cost controllers via state feedback are given in terms of linear matrix inequalities （LMIs）, and the design of an optimal guaranteed cost controller can be reduced to a convex optimization problem. It is shown that the designed controller not only guarantees the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop fuzzy descriptor delay system, but also provides an optimized upper bound of the guaranteed cost. At last, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and the perfect performance of the optimal guaranteed cost controller.

LIFECYCLE SAFETY GUARANTEE OF STRUCTURES

The principles for lifecycle safety guarantee of engineering structures areproposed, and the conception is developed for developing the safety guarantee system by integratingthe monitoring system, analysis system and maintenance system together on the basis of multi-sensor,distribution-measurement, data fusion and digital-signal-processor (DSP) technologies as well asthree-dimensional (3D) fatigue fracture unified theory. As all the systems should work in situs andin real-time, micromation and integration are important. Damage detectability is introduced toclarify the relationship of life prediction and healthy monitoring or faulty diagnosis. The researchwork to realize the lifecycle safety guarantee system is summarized and perspectives for futureefforts are outlined.

Supply Chain Finance Decision Analysis with a Partial Credit Guarantee Contract

The innovation of supply chain financial services can alleviate the plight of SMEs financing difficulties. In the aspect of supply chain finance model, there is a credit guarantee financing model, which is different from the simple external financing and internal financing mode of supply chain. Based on this, this paper studies the decision-making of supply chain finance under the partial credit guarantee of core enterprises. First of all, the paper constructs a simple supply chain financing model, consisting of a bank, a core enterprise and a retailer. And then, considering the credit guarantee financing model, calculate the expected profit function. Stackelberg game model is used to give the optimal decision of each subject in decentralized system and the optimal decision in centralized system. Finally, in order to make a more specific and detailed study on the profit and decision-making based on the credit guarantee financing model, the important parameters of the model are analyzed. Through the calculation, it is proved that under the credit guarantee of the core enterprise, the retailer has the optimal ordering strategy, and the core enterprise has the best wholesale price. The influences of the partial credit guarantee coefficient and the retailer’s loan coefficient on the supply chain finance decision-making are also studied.

Adaptive Control With Guaranteed Transient Behavior and Zero Steady-State Error for Systems With Time-Varying Parameters

It is nontrivial to achieve global zero-error regulation for uncertain nonlinear systems.The underlying problem becomes even more challenging if mismatched uncertainties and unknown time-varying control gain are involved,yet certain performance specifications are also pursued.In this work,we present an adaptive control method,which,without the persistent excitation(PE)condition,is able to ensure global zero-error regulation with guaranteed output performance for parametric strict-feedback systems involving fast time-varying parameters in the feedback path and input path.The development of our control scheme benefits from generalized-dependent and-dependent functions,a novel coordinate transformation and“congelation of variables”method.Both theoretical analysis and numerical simulation verify the effectiveness and benefits of the proposed method.