Optimal resource allocation in conflicts with the Lanchester linear law (2,1) model

This paper presents a detailed analysis of a model for military conflicts where the defending forces have to determine an optimal partitioning of available resources to counter attacks from an adversary in two different fronts in an area fire situation. Lanchester linear law attrition model is used to develop the dynamical equations governing the variation in force strength. Here we address a static resource allocation problem namely, Time-Zero-Allocation (TZA) where the resource allocation is done only at the initial time. Numerical examples are given to support the analytical results.

Optimal resource partitioning in conflicts based on Lanchester (n, 1) attrition model

This paper develops a model for military conflicts where the defending forces have to determine an optimal partitioning of available resources to counter attacks from an adversary from n different fronts. The problem of optimally partitioning the defending forces against the attacking forces is addressed. The Lanchester square law model is used to develop the dynamical equations governing the variation in force strength. Two different allocation schemes-Time-ZeroAllocation (TZA) and Continuous Constant Allocation (CCA) are considered and the optimal solutions for both are obtained analytically. These results generalize other results available in the literature. Numerical examples are given to support the analytical results.

A resource based game theoretical model for military conflicts

A resource interaction based game theoretical model for military conflicts is presented in this paper. The model includes both the spatial decision capability of adversaries (decision regarding movement and subsequent distribution of resources) as well as their temporal decision capability (decision regarding level of allocation of resources for conflict with adversary’s resources). Attrition is decided at present by simple deterministic models. An additional feature of this model is the inclusion of the possibility of a given resource interacting with several resources of the adversary.The decisions of the adversaries is determined by solving for the equilibrium Nash strategies given that the objectives of the adversaries may not be in direct conflict. Examples are given to show the applicability of these models and solution concepts.

Reconciling transactional conflicts with compiler's help

Software transactional memory(STM) is a promising programming paradigm for shared memory multithreaded programs. While STM offers the promise of being less error-prone and more programmer friendly compared to traditional lock-based synchronization, it also needs to be competitive in performance in order for it to be adopted in mainstream software. A major source of performance overheads in STM is transactional aborts. Conflict resolution and aborting a transaction typically happens at the transaction level which has the advantage that it is automatic and application agnostic. However it has a substantial disadvantage in that STM declares the entire transaction as conflicting and hence aborts it and re-executes it fully, instead of partially re-executing only those part(s) of the transaction, which have been affected due to the conflict. This "Re-execute Everything" approach has a significant adverse impact on STM performance. In order to mitigate the abort overheads, we propose a compiler aided Selective Reconciliation STM (SR-STM) scheme, wherein certain transactional conflicts can be reconciled by performing partial re-execution of the transaction. Ours is a selective hybrid approach which uses compiler analysis to identify those data accesses which are legal and profitable candidates for reconciliation and applies partial re-execution only to these candidates selectively while other conflicting data accesses are handled by the default STM approach of abort and full re-execution. We describe the compiler analysis and code transformations required for supporting selective reconciliation. We find that SR-STM is effective in reducing the transactional abort overheads by improving the performance for a set of five STAMP benchmarks by 12.58% on an average and up to 22.34%.

Cultural-Evolution of Ecological Prudence

Animals often behave in a profligate fashion and decimate the populations of plants and animals they depend upon. They may, however, evolve prudent behaviour under special conditions, namely when such prudence greatly enhances the success of populations that are not too prone to invasions by profligate individuals. Cultural evolution in human societies can also lead to the adoption of prudent practices under similar conditions. These are more likely to be realized in stable environments in which the human populations tend to grow close to the carrying capacity, when the human groups are closed, and when the technology is stagnant. These conditions probably prevailed in the hunter—gatherer societies of the tropics and subtropics, and led to the adoption of a number of socially imposed restraints on the use of plant and animal resources. Such practices were rationalized in the form of Nature-worship. The Indian caste society became so organized as to fulfill these conditions, and gave rise to two religions, Buddhism and Jainism, which emphasize compassion towards all forms of life. The pastoral nomads of the middle east, on the other hand, lived in an environment which militated against prudence, and these societies gave rise to religions like Christianity, which declared war on nature. As the ruling elite and state have grown in power, they have tried to wrest control of natural resources from the local communities. This has sometimes resulted in conservation and prudent use under guidance from the state, but has often led to conflicts with local populations to the detriment of prudent behaviour. Modern technological progress has also often removed the need for conservation, as when availability of coal permitted the deforestation of England. While modern scientific understanding has led to a better appreciation of the need for prudence, the prevailing social and economic conditions often militate against any implementation of the understanding, as is seen from the history of whaling. However, the imperative for survival of the poor from the Third-World countries may finally bring about conditions in which ecological prudence may once again come to dominate human cultures as it might once have done with stable societies of hunter—gatherers.

Adaptive significance of the Indian caste system: an ecological perspective

Indian society is an agglomeration of several thousand endogamous groups or castes each with a restricted geographical range and a hereditarily determine mode of subsistence. These reproductively isolated castes may be compared to biological species, and the society thought of as a biological community with each caste having its specific ecological niche. In this paper we examine the ecological-niche relationships of castes which are directly dependent on natural resources. Evidence is presented to show that castes living together in the same region had so organized their pattern of resource use as to avoid excessive intercaste competition for limiting resources. Furthermore, territorial division of the total range of the caste regulated intra-caste competition. Hence, a particular plant or animal resource in a given locality was used almost exclusively by a given lineage within a caste generation after generation. This favoured the cultural evolution of traditions ensuring sustainable use of natural resources. This must have contributed significantly to the stability of Indian caste society over several thousand years. The collapse of the base of natural resources and increasing monetarization of the economy has, however, destroyed the earlier complementarity between the different castes and led to increasing conflicts between them in recent years.

A new parallel algorithm for parsing arithmetic infix expressions

A new parallel algorithm for transforming an arithmetic infix expression into a par se tree is presented. The technique is based on a result due to Fischer (1980) which enables the construction of the parse tree, by appropriately scanning the vector of precedence values associated with the elements of the expression. The algorithm presented here is suitable for execution on a shared memory model of an SIMD machine with no read/write conflicts permitted. It uses O(n) processors and has a time complexity of O(log2n) where n is the expression length. Parallel algorithms for generating code for an SIMD machine are also presented.

Designing Dense Radar Networks for Weather Surveillance in Tropical Regions.

Design considerations are presented for a dense weather radar network to support multiple services including aviation. Conflicts, tradeoffs and optimization issues in the context of operation in a tropical region are brought out. The upcoming Indian radar network is used as a case study. Algorithms for data mosaicing are briefly outlined.

Conflict-Tolerant Real-Time Features

This paper addresses the problem of detecting and resolving conflicts due to timing constraints imposed by features in real-time systems. We consider systems composed of a base system with multiple features or controllers, each of which independently advise the system on how to react to input events so as to conform to their individual specifications. We propose a methodology for developing such systems in a modular manner based on the notion of conflict tolerant features that are designed to continue offering advice even when their advice has been overridden in the past. We give a simple priority based scheme for composing such features. This guarantees the maximal use of each feature. We provide a formal framework for specifying such features, and a compositional technique for verifying systems developed in this framework.

Supervisory Control for Real-Time Systems Based on Conflict-Tolerant Controllers

This paper addresses the problem of detecting and resolving conflicts due to timing constraints imposed by features in real-time and hybrid systems. We consider systems composed of a base system with multiple features or controllers, each of which independently advise the system on how to react to input events so as to conform to their individual specifications. We propose a methodology for developing such systems in a modular manner based on the notion of conflict-tolerant features that are designed to continue offering advice even when their advice has been overridden in the past. We give a simple priority-based scheme forcomposing such features. This guarantees the maximal use of each feature. We provide a formal framework for specifying such features, and a compositional technique for verifying systems developed in this framework.

Optimal Resource Partitioning in a Military Conflict based on Lanchester Attrition Models

This paper develops a model for military conflicts where the defending forces have to determine an optimal partitioning of available resources to counter attacks from an adversary in two different fronts. The Lanchester attrition model is used to develop the dynamical equations governing the variation in force strength. Three different allocation schemes - Time-Zero-Allocation (TZA), Allocate-Assess-Reallocate (AAR), and Continuous Constant Allocation (CCA) - are considered and the optimal solutions are obtained in each case. Numerical examples are given to support the analytical results.

Optimal Resource Partitioning in a Military Conflict based on Lanchester Attrition Models

This paper develops a model for military conflicts where the defending forces have to determine an optimal partitioning of available resources to counter attacks from an adversary in two different fronts. The Lanchester attrition model is used to develop the dynamical equations governing the variation in force strength. Three different allocation schemes - Time-Zero-Allocation (TZA), Allocate-Assess-Reallocate (AAR), and Continuous Constant Allocation (CCA) - are considered and the optimal solutions are obtained in each case. Numerical examples are given to support the analytical results.

Impaired conflict monitoring in Parkinson's disease patients during an oculomotor redirect task

Fallibility is inherent in human cognition and so a system that will monitor performance is indispensable. While behavioral evidence for such a system derives from the finding that subjects slow down after trials that are likely to produce errors, the neural and behavioral characterization that enables such control is incomplete. Here, we report a specific role for dopamine/basal ganglia in response conflict by accessing deficits in performance monitoring in patients with Parkinson's disease. To characterize such a deficit, we used a modification of the oculomotor countermanding task to show that slowing down of responses that generate robust response conflict, and not post-error per se, is deficient in Parkinson's disease patients. Poor performance adjustment could be either due to impaired ability to slow RT subsequent to conflicts or due to impaired response conflict recognition. If the latter hypothesis was true, then PD subjects should show evidence of impaired error detection/correction, which was found to be the case. These results make a strong case for impaired performance monitoring in Parkinson's patients.

Improved preprocessing methods for modulo scheduling algorithms

Instruction scheduling with an automaton-based resource conflict model is well-established for normal scheduling. Such models have been generalized to software pipelining in the modulo-scheduling framework. One weakness with existing methods is that a distinct automaton must be constructed for each combination of a reservation table and initiation interval. In this work, we present a different approach to model conflicts. We construct one automaton for each reservation table which acts as a compact encoding of all the conflict automata for this table, which can be recovered for use in modulo-scheduling. The basic premise of the construction is to move away from the Proebsting-Fraser model of conflict automaton to the Muller model of automaton modelling issue sequences. The latter turns out to be useful and efficient in this situation. Having constructed this automaton, we show how to improve the estimate of resource constrained initiation interval. Such a bound is always better than the average-use estimate. We show that our bound is safe: it is always lower than the true initiation interval. This use of the automaton is orthogonal to its use in modulo-scheduling. Once we generate the required information during pre-processing, we can compute the lower bound for a program without any further reference to the automaton.

The Asian elephants Elephas maximus of Cat Tien National Park, Vietnam: status and conservation of a vanishing population

This study updates the status and conservation of the Endangered Asian elephant Elephas maximus in Cat Tien National Park, Vietnam. Line transect indirect surveys, block surveys for elephant signs, village surveys of elephant-human conflict incidents, guard-post surveys for records of sightings, and surveys of elephant food plants were undertaken during the dry and wet seasons of 2001. A minimum of 11 elephants and a maximum of 15-17 elephants was estimated for c. 500 km2 of the Park and its vicinity. The elephants are largely confined to the southern boundary of the Park and make extensive use of the adjoining La Nga State Forest Enterprises. During the dry season the elephants depend on at least 26 species of wild and cultivated plants, chiefly the fruits of cashew. Most of the villages surveyed reported some elephant-human conflict. Two adult male elephants seem to cover a large area to raid crops, whereas the family groups restrict themselves to a few villages; overall, the conflict is not serious. Since 2001 there have been no reports of any deaths or births of elephants in the Park. We make recommendations for habitat protection and management, increasing the viability of the small population, reducing elephant-human conflicts, and improving the chances of survival of the declining elephants of this Park. The Government has now approved an Action Plan for Urgent Conservation Areas in Vietnam that calls for the establishment of three elephant conservation areas in the country, including Cat Tien National Park.