This paper gives an overview of recent development of the marine well containment system (MWCS) after BP Macondo subsea well blowout occurred on April 20,2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. Capping stack,a hard-ware utilized ...This paper gives an overview of recent development of the marine well containment system (MWCS) after BP Macondo subsea well blowout occurred on April 20,2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. Capping stack,a hard-ware utilized to contain blowout well at or near the wellhead is the center piece of MWCS. Accessibility to the dedicated capping stacks is gradually becoming a pre-requirement to obtain the permit for offshore drilling/workover, and the industry for manufacturing,maintenance,transportation and operation of the capping stack is in the making.展开更多
In order to apply overbooking idea in Chinese railway freight industry to improve revenue, a Markov decision process(dynamic programming) model for railway freight reservation was formulated and the overbooking limit ...In order to apply overbooking idea in Chinese railway freight industry to improve revenue, a Markov decision process(dynamic programming) model for railway freight reservation was formulated and the overbooking limit level was proposed as a control policy. However, computing the dynamic programming treatment needs six nested loops and this will be burdensome for real-world problems. To break through the calculation limit, the properties of value function were analyzed and the overbooking protection level was proposed to reduce the calculating quantity. The simulation experiments show that the overbooking protection level for the lower-fare class is higher than that for the higher-fare class, so the overbooking strategy is nested by fare class. Besides, by analyzing the influence on the overbooking strategy of freight arrival probability and cancellation probability, the proposed approach is efficient and also has a good application prospect in reality. Also, compared with the existing reservation(FCFS), the overbooking strategy performs better in the fields of vacancy reduction and revenue improvement.展开更多
The Basel II committee sets their customers. This new up directives encouraging banks to use internal scores in order to assess the risk of form of information competes with the existing ones. Small and medium-sized e...The Basel II committee sets their customers. This new up directives encouraging banks to use internal scores in order to assess the risk of form of information competes with the existing ones. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are most concerned by these new stakes, due to the lack of transparency. The aim of this paper is to understand the determinants of the choice between substitution and complementarity between the two types of information: "soft" and "hard", to test a potential effect of this choice on the banking performance and to describe which variables are involved in the decision-making process. The originality of this work is to try to quantify the information costs and to use it as a variable which is affecting the adopted choice.展开更多
Sustainable development contributes to the economic and social advancement of construction projects. Ignoring sustainability during the cost estimating process associated with evaluation phase develops many problems o...Sustainable development contributes to the economic and social advancement of construction projects. Ignoring sustainability during the cost estimating process associated with evaluation phase develops many problems of conventional decision methodology used in construction industry in the most of developing countries. This research focuses on sustainability which is the key factor in all decision making in design and construction processes. Therefore, Iraqi construction industry should respond to sustainability as a leading indicator of its infrastructure rebuilding. The construction management and sustainability could help to manage the rebuilding of the destroyed public infrastructure during the disaster wars periods passed thru thirty years ago and also to modernize of private buildings and plants. Field study has been carried out by adopting personal interviews and questionnaires conducted with experts, experienced consultants and designers working in many design organizations. The data collected has been analyzed and the results obtained show a clear weakness in the field of sustainability understanding, practicing and implementation. Moreover, the design work in Iraq is suffering from a lack of scientific techniques and a lack in experience in the domain of sustainability field. This will take an integrated approach to study the impact of sustainability on construction management which encompasses both public and private sector perspectives for building and engineering construction, and the roles played by all the participants in the construction team (owners, contractors, design professionals, and other supporting professionals).展开更多
This paper describes a Bayesian approach to robot group control applied in industrial applications. The proposed model is based on well-known concepts of Ubiquitous Computing and can enable some degree of contextual p...This paper describes a Bayesian approach to robot group control applied in industrial applications. The proposed model is based on well-known concepts of Ubiquitous Computing and can enable some degree of contextual perception of the environment. Compared with classical industrial robots, usually preprogrammed for a limited number of operations/actions, the system based on this model can react in uncertain situations and scenarios. The model combines ontology to describe the specific domain of interest and decision-making mechanisms based on Bayesian Networks to enable the work of a single robot without human intervention by learning Behavioral Patterns of other robots in the group. The described model is designed to be expressive enough to provide adequate level of abstractions needed for making timely appropriate actions and respecting the current application.展开更多
Quality is considered as one of the most important elements in the construction industry. The factors affecting quality in the construction industry should be assessed. This paper aims to introduce a new model to asse...Quality is considered as one of the most important elements in the construction industry. The factors affecting quality in the construction industry should be assessed. This paper aims to introduce a new model to assess these factors. The model is namely Fuzzy Assessment Model for Quality (FAMQ). Fuzzy set theory provides a useful way to deal with ill-defined and complex problems in a decision-making environment that incorporates vagueness. The proposed model employs the combined effect of both; the factors probability of occurrence and their impacts on the quality of construction. Twenty five logical rules for each factor were implemented in the model. The model was evaluated using data that collected from the infrastructure projects in Egypt. It was applied to many factors that affect the quality of this kind of projects as a case study. The results of the study proved that the proposed model can be used successfully in the assessment of factors affecting quality in the construction industry. In addition, the results provided a platform of useful assessment reference to those infrastructure's finns, who plan to establish their businesses in Egypt.展开更多
Financial statements (FS) are tools which provide information to users for making business decisions. Among the organizations, banks are the firms which conducted and did business with risks. In particular, commerci...Financial statements (FS) are tools which provide information to users for making business decisions. Among the organizations, banks are the firms which conducted and did business with risks. In particular, commercial banks continue to play a dominant role in the whole system, and local commercial banks still have an edge in its widespread network across the country over foreign banks. This article is going to present the survey which clarifies the role of FS in commercial banks' loan decisions in Vietnam. Moreover, this paper also discusses FS's quality currently, thereby making suggestions for enterprises to enhance the usefulness of accounting information in borrowing activities. This paper has taken performance with 74 official employees in commercial banks in Vietnam. The results indicated the qualitative characteristics of banks when disclosing the financial statements. This article also gave the six oriented solutions to improvement of the loan decision-making by banks.展开更多
The aim of this research is to study the optimal demand decision for the Taiwan Residents industries through CSO (cat swarm optimization) algorithm. The five formulations of optimal demand are developed to solve opt...The aim of this research is to study the optimal demand decision for the Taiwan Residents industries through CSO (cat swarm optimization) algorithm. The five formulations of optimal demand are developed to solve optimal contract capacity for TOU (time of use) customer. Results indicated that, the CSO algorithm is highly helpful to Taiwan Residents industries on the optimal demand decision. Also the CSO is superior to PSO (particle swarm optimization) in the fast convergence and better performance to find the global best solution in the same iterations.展开更多
The distribution of market shares within an industry is a relevant performance measure for managers and policy makers, for it allow to determine whether a given industry is competitive or not. Usually, the perfect com...The distribution of market shares within an industry is a relevant performance measure for managers and policy makers, for it allow to determine whether a given industry is competitive or not. Usually, the perfect competition model is the reference to judge the efficiency of markets. However, there is enough empirical evidence that shows that one of the most evident features of global firms is that both their size and market are Zipf-distributed. In this paper, we show that the distribution of market shares in the world cola-drink market is skewed, but it does not follow Zipf's law, thus it is inadequate to generalize it to any kind of market.展开更多
文摘This paper gives an overview of recent development of the marine well containment system (MWCS) after BP Macondo subsea well blowout occurred on April 20,2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. Capping stack,a hard-ware utilized to contain blowout well at or near the wellhead is the center piece of MWCS. Accessibility to the dedicated capping stacks is gradually becoming a pre-requirement to obtain the permit for offshore drilling/workover, and the industry for manufacturing,maintenance,transportation and operation of the capping stack is in the making.
基金Project(2010QZZD021)supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities,ChinaProject(2015F024)supported by China Railway Science and Technology Research Development Program
文摘In order to apply overbooking idea in Chinese railway freight industry to improve revenue, a Markov decision process(dynamic programming) model for railway freight reservation was formulated and the overbooking limit level was proposed as a control policy. However, computing the dynamic programming treatment needs six nested loops and this will be burdensome for real-world problems. To break through the calculation limit, the properties of value function were analyzed and the overbooking protection level was proposed to reduce the calculating quantity. The simulation experiments show that the overbooking protection level for the lower-fare class is higher than that for the higher-fare class, so the overbooking strategy is nested by fare class. Besides, by analyzing the influence on the overbooking strategy of freight arrival probability and cancellation probability, the proposed approach is efficient and also has a good application prospect in reality. Also, compared with the existing reservation(FCFS), the overbooking strategy performs better in the fields of vacancy reduction and revenue improvement.
文摘The Basel II committee sets their customers. This new up directives encouraging banks to use internal scores in order to assess the risk of form of information competes with the existing ones. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are most concerned by these new stakes, due to the lack of transparency. The aim of this paper is to understand the determinants of the choice between substitution and complementarity between the two types of information: "soft" and "hard", to test a potential effect of this choice on the banking performance and to describe which variables are involved in the decision-making process. The originality of this work is to try to quantify the information costs and to use it as a variable which is affecting the adopted choice.
文摘Sustainable development contributes to the economic and social advancement of construction projects. Ignoring sustainability during the cost estimating process associated with evaluation phase develops many problems of conventional decision methodology used in construction industry in the most of developing countries. This research focuses on sustainability which is the key factor in all decision making in design and construction processes. Therefore, Iraqi construction industry should respond to sustainability as a leading indicator of its infrastructure rebuilding. The construction management and sustainability could help to manage the rebuilding of the destroyed public infrastructure during the disaster wars periods passed thru thirty years ago and also to modernize of private buildings and plants. Field study has been carried out by adopting personal interviews and questionnaires conducted with experts, experienced consultants and designers working in many design organizations. The data collected has been analyzed and the results obtained show a clear weakness in the field of sustainability understanding, practicing and implementation. Moreover, the design work in Iraq is suffering from a lack of scientific techniques and a lack in experience in the domain of sustainability field. This will take an integrated approach to study the impact of sustainability on construction management which encompasses both public and private sector perspectives for building and engineering construction, and the roles played by all the participants in the construction team (owners, contractors, design professionals, and other supporting professionals).
文摘This paper describes a Bayesian approach to robot group control applied in industrial applications. The proposed model is based on well-known concepts of Ubiquitous Computing and can enable some degree of contextual perception of the environment. Compared with classical industrial robots, usually preprogrammed for a limited number of operations/actions, the system based on this model can react in uncertain situations and scenarios. The model combines ontology to describe the specific domain of interest and decision-making mechanisms based on Bayesian Networks to enable the work of a single robot without human intervention by learning Behavioral Patterns of other robots in the group. The described model is designed to be expressive enough to provide adequate level of abstractions needed for making timely appropriate actions and respecting the current application.
文摘Quality is considered as one of the most important elements in the construction industry. The factors affecting quality in the construction industry should be assessed. This paper aims to introduce a new model to assess these factors. The model is namely Fuzzy Assessment Model for Quality (FAMQ). Fuzzy set theory provides a useful way to deal with ill-defined and complex problems in a decision-making environment that incorporates vagueness. The proposed model employs the combined effect of both; the factors probability of occurrence and their impacts on the quality of construction. Twenty five logical rules for each factor were implemented in the model. The model was evaluated using data that collected from the infrastructure projects in Egypt. It was applied to many factors that affect the quality of this kind of projects as a case study. The results of the study proved that the proposed model can be used successfully in the assessment of factors affecting quality in the construction industry. In addition, the results provided a platform of useful assessment reference to those infrastructure's finns, who plan to establish their businesses in Egypt.
文摘Financial statements (FS) are tools which provide information to users for making business decisions. Among the organizations, banks are the firms which conducted and did business with risks. In particular, commercial banks continue to play a dominant role in the whole system, and local commercial banks still have an edge in its widespread network across the country over foreign banks. This article is going to present the survey which clarifies the role of FS in commercial banks' loan decisions in Vietnam. Moreover, this paper also discusses FS's quality currently, thereby making suggestions for enterprises to enhance the usefulness of accounting information in borrowing activities. This paper has taken performance with 74 official employees in commercial banks in Vietnam. The results indicated the qualitative characteristics of banks when disclosing the financial statements. This article also gave the six oriented solutions to improvement of the loan decision-making by banks.
文摘The aim of this research is to study the optimal demand decision for the Taiwan Residents industries through CSO (cat swarm optimization) algorithm. The five formulations of optimal demand are developed to solve optimal contract capacity for TOU (time of use) customer. Results indicated that, the CSO algorithm is highly helpful to Taiwan Residents industries on the optimal demand decision. Also the CSO is superior to PSO (particle swarm optimization) in the fast convergence and better performance to find the global best solution in the same iterations.
文摘The distribution of market shares within an industry is a relevant performance measure for managers and policy makers, for it allow to determine whether a given industry is competitive or not. Usually, the perfect competition model is the reference to judge the efficiency of markets. However, there is enough empirical evidence that shows that one of the most evident features of global firms is that both their size and market are Zipf-distributed. In this paper, we show that the distribution of market shares in the world cola-drink market is skewed, but it does not follow Zipf's law, thus it is inadequate to generalize it to any kind of market.