The Four Intersection-and-Difference Model for Line-Line Topological Relations

The description of line-line topological relations is still an unsolved issue although much effort has been done. The problem is involved in many practical applications such as spatial query, spatial analysis and cartographic generalization. To develop a sound and effective approach to describe line-line relations, it is first necessary to define the topology of an individual line, i.e., local topology. The concept of connective degree is used for the identification of topological differences in the geometric structure of a line. The general topological definition of a line is given, i.e., endpoints set and interior point set. This definition can be applied to the embedded spaces of different dimensions, whether co-dimension is equal to or larger than zero. On this basis, a generic model called the 4 intersection-and-difference is set up for the description of basic line-line topological relations, upon which a conceptual neighborhood graph is built with consideration of topological distance, it is concluded that the proposed model can represent the property of topological changes, and basic relations between line segments in IR^1 and IR^2.

Effective Thermal Property Estimation of Unitary Pebble Beds Based on a CFD-DEM Coupled Method for a Fusion Blanket

Lithium ceramic pebble beds have been considered in the solid blanket design for fusion reactors.To characterize the fusion solid blanket thermal performance,studies of the effective thermal properties,i.e.the effective thermal conductivity and heat transfer coefficient,of the pebble beds are necessary.In this paper,a 3D computational fluid dynamics discrete element method（CFD-DEM） coupled numerical model was proposed to simulate heat transfer and thereby estimate the effective thermal properties.The DEM was applied to produce a geometric topology of a prototypical blanket pebble bed by directly simulating the contact state of each individual particle using basic interaction laws.Based on this geometric topology,a CFD model was built to analyze the temperature distribution and obtain the effective thermal properties.The current numerical model was shown to be in good agreement with the existing experimental data for effective thermal conductivity available in the literature.

Jackknife and Bootstrap Tests of the Composition Vector Trees

Composition vector trees （CVTrees） are inferred from whole-genome data by an alignment-free and parameter-free method. The agreement of these trees with the corresponding taxonomy provides an objective justification of the inferred phylogeny. In this work, we show the stability and self-consistency of CVTrees by performing bootstrap and jackknife re-sampling tests adapted to this alignment-free approach. Our ultimate goal is to advocate the viewpoint that time-consuming statistical re-sampling tests can be avoided at all in using this alignment-free approach. Agreement with taxonomy should be taken as a major criterion to estimate prokaryotic phylogenetic trees.

Consensus of Flocks under M-Nearest-Neighbor Rules

This paper investigates a class of flocks with an M-nearest-neighbor rule,where each agent's neighbors are determined according to M nearest agents with M being a given integer,rather than all the agents within a fixed metric distance as in the well-known Vicsek's model.Such a neighbor rule has been validated by biologists through experiments and the authors will prove that,similar to the Vicsek's model,such a new neighbor rule can also achieve consensus under some conditions imposed only on the system's speed and the number M,n,without resorting to any priori connectivity assumptions on the trajectory of the system.In particular,the authors will prove that if the number M is proportional to the population size n,then for any speed v,the system will achieve consensus with large probability if the population size is large enough.