Probabilistic models to assist maintenance of multiple instruments

The paper discusses maintenance challenges of organisations with a huge number of devices and proposes the use of probabilistic models to assist monitoring and maintenance planning. The proposal assumes connectivity of instruments to report relevant features for monitoring. Also, the existence of enough historical registers with diagnosed breakdowns is required to make probabilistic models reliable and useful for predictive maintenance strategies based on them. Regular Markov models based on estimated failure and repair rates are proposed to calculate the availability of the instruments and Dynamic Bayesian Networks are proposed to model cause-effect relationships to trigger predictive maintenance services based on the influence between observed features and previously documented diagnostics

Stable coalition structures with fixed decision scheme

This paper studies the stability of a finite local public goods economy in horizontal differentiation, where a jurisdiction's choice of the public good is given by an exogenous decision scheme. In this paper, we characterize the class of decision schemes that ensure the existence of an equilibrium with free mobility (that we call Tiebout equilibrium) for monotone distribution of players. This class contains all the decision schemes whose choice lies between the Rawlsian decision scheme and the median voter with mid-distance of the two median voters when there are ties. We show that for non-monotone distribution, there is no decision scheme that can ensure the stability of coalitions. In the last part of the paper, we prove the non-emptiness of the core of this coalition formation game

Cooperative vs. non-cooperative mechanisms in the EU decision making process

According to the account of the European Union (EU) decision making proposed in this paper, this is a bargaining process during which actors shift their policy positions with a view to reaching agreements on controversial issues.

Learning from Shocks and the Decision to Open

Two claims pervade the literature on the political economy of market reforms: that economic crises cause reforms; and that crises matter because they bring into question the validity of the economic model held to be responsible for them. Economic crises are said to spur a process of learning that is conducive to the abandonment of failing models and to the adoption of successful models. But although these claims have become the conventional wisdom, they have been hardly tested empirically due to the lack of agreement on what constitutes a crisis and to difficulties in measuring learning from them. I propose a model of rational learning from experience and apply it to the decision to open the economy. Using data from 1964 through 1990, I show that learning from the 1982 debt crisis was relevant to the first wave of adoption of an export promotion strategy, but learning was conditional on the high variability of economic outcomes in countries that opened up to trade. Learning was also symbolic in that the sheer number of other countries that liberalized was a more important driver of others’ decisions to follow suit.

A decision-making Fokker-Planck model in computational neuroscience

Minimal models for the explanation of decision-making in computational neuroscience are based on the analysis of the evolution for the average firing rates of two interacting neuron populations. While these models typically lead to multi-stable scenario for the basic derived dynamical systems, noise is an important feature of the model taking into account finite-size effects and robustness of the decisions. These stochastic dynamical systems can be analyzed by studying carefully their associated Fokker-Planck partial differential equation. In particular, we discuss the existence, positivity and uniqueness for the solution of the stationary equation, as well as for the time evolving problem. Moreover, we prove convergence of the solution to the the stationary state representing the probability distribution of finding the neuron families in each of the decision states characterized by their average firing rates. Finally, we propose a numerical scheme allowing for simulations performed on the Fokker-Planck equation which are in agreement with those obtained recently by a moment method applied to the stochastic differential system. Our approach leads to a more detailed analytical and numerical study of this decision-making model in computational neuroscience.

Aprenentatges i oportunitats després de la implementació d'un nou sistema automatitzat

Es descriuen els aprenentatges, canvis i oportunitats arrel del procés de canvi del sistema de gestió de biblioteques del CCUC i dels altres catàlegs del CBUC. S’inicia amb una introducció sobre la decisió d’emprendre conjuntament el procés de canvi de sistema i com es va planificar i organitzar la seva implementació. Detalla actuacions prèvies que es van realitzar com el procés de canvi de format MARC, descriu el nou entorn que aquest canvi permet al CBUC, com oferir la gestió, hostatjament i manteniment de sistemes automatitzats per catàlegs locals i relaciona les millores d’OPAC. Finalment s'elaboren unes consideracions generals sobre els aprenentatges i oportunitats arrel d’aquest procés, amb la finalitat que siguin d’utilitat en futures experiències similars.

Bringing actors and violent conflict into forced migration literature. A model of the decision to return

Populations displaced as a result of mass violent conflict have become one of the most pressing humanitarian concerns of the last decades. They have also become one salient political issue as a perceived burden (in economic and security terms) and as an important piece in the shift towards a more interventionist paradigm in the international system, based on both humanitarian and security grounds. The saliency of these aspects has detracted attention from the analysis of the interactions between relocation processes and violent conflict. Violent conflict studies have also largely ignored those interactions as a result of the consideration of these processes as mere reaction movements determined by structural conditions. This article takes the view that individual’s agency is retained during such processes, and that it is consequential, calling for the need to introduce a micro perspective. Based on this, a model for the individual’s decision of return is presented. The model has the potential to account for the dynamics of return at both the individual and the aggregate level. And it further helps to grasp fundamental interconnections with violent conflict. Some relevant conclusions are derived for the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina and about the implications of the politicization of return.

Revisiting the size-R&D productivity relation: introducing the mediating role of decision-making style on the scale and quality of innovative output

We develop a mediation model in which firm size is proposed to affect the scale and quality of innovative output through the adoption of different decision styles during the R&D process. The aim of this study is to understand how the internal changes that firms undergo as they evolve from small to larger organizations affect R&D productivity. In so doing, we illuminate the underlying theoretical mechanism affecting two different dimensions of R&D productivity, namely the scale and quality of innovative output which have not received much attention in previous literature. Using longitudinal data of Spanish manufacturing firms we explore the validity of this mediation model. Our results show that as firms evolve in size, they increasingly emphasize analytical decision making, and consequently, large-sized firms aim for higher-quality innovations while small firms aim for a larger scale of innovative output.

COSMOS : gestor de continguts accessibles

Cada cop són més els usuaris que es troben amb la necessitat de posar els seus serveis i/o productes a Internet. Un cop que els usuaris prenen aquesta decisió, és habitual que es trobin amb eines poc intuïtives i complexes que dificulten la tasca de manteniment de la informació que es vol mostrar al portal web. La finalitat d'aquest projecte és apropar les tasques de manteniment als usuaris per tal que puguin modificar els continguts publicats al seu portal web, independentment de la seves capacitats tecnològiques o sensorials.

Free Technology Academy : a Joint Venture of Free Software and OER

The decision to publish educational materials openly and under free licenses brings up the challenge of doing it in a sustainable way. Some lessons can be learned from the business models for production, maintenance and distribution of Free and Open Source Software. The Free Technology Academy (FTA) has taken on these challenges and has implemented some of these models. We briefly review the FTA educational programme, methodologies and organisation, and see to which extent these models are proving successful in the case of the FTA.

The Decision on Turkish EU accession in December 2002: The logic of anarchy, collective action problems and rhetorical action

Studies of the EU accession of the East and Central European Countries have stressed the importance of neo-liberal institutionalism as an explanation for Member State preferences. In this paper it is argued that Member States’ preferences over Turkish EU accession are better explained by power politics and neo-realism. It seems therefore that Turkey’s way to the EU follows another path than the East and Central Countries. Turkish accession raises the question of the EU’s role in a uni-polar world order – whether the EU should develop into an independent actor on the world stage or not. However, when it comes to the interaction among the Member States in order to decide on when to open accession negotiations with Turkey the constitutive values of the EU seriously modify the outcome that pure power politics would have let to.

Intraovarian sperm storage in Helicolenus dactylopterus dactylopterus fertilitzation, crypt formation and maintenance of stored sperm

The females of the bluemouth rockfish, Helicolenus dactylopterus dactylopterus (DelaRoche, 1809), store sperm within their ovaries for periods of up to 10 months. Twenty six females with standard lengths between 152 and 257 mm and six males with standard lengths between 253 and 209 mm were caught storage crypts with stored spermatozoa and to describe their evolution over the year. After internal fertilization and once sperm reaches the ovary, a crypt forms probably by an epithelial inclusion at the base of the lamellae of one or several spermatozoa groups that are floating freely in the interlamellar space of the ovarian lumen. Stored spermatozoa have a large cytoplasm bag surrounding their heads. This bag could serve as a nutritive reservoir during the long storage period. Many desmosonal and tight junctions between the crypt cells ensure tha male sex cells are protected against the female immune system

Decision Support Methods for Global Optomization

Immobile location-allocation (LA) problems is a type of LA problem that consists in determining the service each facility should offer in order to optimize some criterion (like the global demand), given the positions of the facilities and the customers. Due to the complexity of the problem, i.e. it is a combinatorial problem (where is the number of possible services and the number of facilities) with a non-convex search space with several sub-optimums, traditional methods cannot be applied directly to optimize this problem. Thus we proposed the use of clustering analysis to convert the initial problem into several smaller sub-problems. By this way, we presented and analyzed the suitability of some clustering methods to partition the commented LA problem. Then we explored the use of some metaheuristic techniques such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing or cuckoo search in order to solve the sub-problems after the clustering analysis

List-based decision problems

When encountering a set of alternatives displayed in the form of a list, the decision maker usually determines a particular alternative, after which she stops checking the remaining ones, and chooses an alternative from those observed so far. We present a framework in which both decision problems are explicitly modeled, and axiomatically characterize a stop-and-choose rule which unifies position-biased successive choice and satisficing choice.

Neuronal adaptation effects in decision making

Recently, there has been an increased interest on the neural mechanisms underlying perceptual decision making. However, the effect of neuronal adaptation in this context has not yet been studied. We begin our study by investigating how adaptation can bias perceptual decisions. We considered behavioral data from an experiment on high-level adaptation-related aftereffects in a perceptual decision task with ambiguous stimuli on humans. To understand the driving force behind the perceptual decision process, a biologically inspired cortical network model was used. Two theoretical scenarios arose for explaining the perceptual switch from the category of the adaptor stimulus to the opposite, nonadapted one. One is noise-driven transition due to the probabilistic spike times of neurons and the other is adaptation-driven transition due to afterhyperpolarization currents. With increasing levels of neural adaptation, the system shifts from a noise-driven to an adaptation-driven modus. The behavioral results show that the underlying model is not just a bistable model, as usual in the decision-making modeling literature, but that neuronal adaptation is high and therefore the working point of the model is in the oscillatory regime. Using the same model parameters, we studied the effect of neural adaptation in a perceptual decision-making task where the same ambiguous stimulus was presented with and without a preceding adaptor stimulus. We find that for different levels of sensory evidence favoring one of the two interpretations of the ambiguous stimulus, higher levels of neural adaptation lead to quicker decisions contributing to a speed–accuracy trade off.