Taking pluralism seriously:Embedded moralities in management accounting and control systems

Professor Norman Macintosh has long been a leading, and at times a dissonant, voice in critical accounting studies, exhibiting an intellectual dexterity seldom encountered in the accounting academy. His work ranges from the application of traditional organizational theories within work organizations to poststructural renderings of capital market exigencies. Here, we consider and extend Professor Macintosh's work contemplating the morality embedded within, and propagated by, management accounting and control systems (macs). We begin with Macintosh (1995) employing structuration theory in investigating the ethics of profit manipulation within large, decentralized corporations. The work highlights the fundamental dialectical contradictions within these work organizations, demonstrates the indeterminacy of traditional ethical reasoning, and shows the extent to which macs provide legitimating underpinnings for management action. We propose to extend the conversation using the tools provided in Macintosh's subsequent work: a Levinasian ethic (Macintosh et al., 2009), and heteroglossic accounting (Macintosh, 2002)—both emerging from his poststructuralist predilections. A Levinasian perspective provides an ontologically grounded ethic, and heteroglossic accounting calls for multiple accountings representing alternative moral voices. A critical dialogic framework is proposed as a theoretic for imagining heteroglossic accounting that takes pluralism seriously by recognizing the reality of irresolvable differences and asymmetric power relationships associated with assorted moral perspectives.

The two-way relationship between the Balanced Scorecard and Management Control Systems in organizations:Lessons from a Case Study

This paper reports a case study conducted in Quinta da Aveleda, one of
the three largest Portuguese wine companies. Our aim was to explore the
relationship established between a newly implemented Balanced Scorecard
(BSC) and the elements of the Management Control System (MCS) in the
organization. Thus, two specific objectives were pursued. Firstly, to identify
the influences (barriers, opportunities) of the existing MCS on the implementation
of the BSC. Secondly, to identify the impacts the BSC implementation
was able to exert on the configuration of the organization’s MCS.
We found that the budgeting process, the planning system, the information
infrastructure, and the organizational structure and culture were the elements
of the previous MCS that influenced the BSC implementation process.
Eventually, the BSC implementation led to important changes in the budgeting,
planning, reporting systems and processes. In order to explain these
findings, we briefly explored the main issues and factors accounting for the
scope and nature of the BSC’s impacts on Quinta da Aveleda. These issues
and factors were the mobilized organizational resources, the implementation
approach, the communication, and the organizational support.

PRECYSE: Cyber-attack Detection and Response for Industrial Control Systems

In this short paper, we present an integrated approach to detecting and mitigating cyber-attacks to modern interconnected industrial control systems. One of the primary goals of this approach is that it is cost effective, and thus whenever possible it builds on open-source security technologies and open standards, which are complemented with novel security solutions that address the specific challenges of securing critical infrastructures.

Logic and Memory Design Based on Unequal Error Protection for Voltage-scalable, Robust and Adaptive DSP Systems

In this paper, we propose a system level design approach considering voltage over-scaling (VOS) that achieves error resiliency using unequal error protection of different computation elements, while incurring minor quality degradation. Depending on user specifications and severity of process variations/channel noise, the degree of VOS in each block of the system is adaptively tuned to ensure minimum system power while providing "just-the-right" amount of quality and robustness. This is achieved, by taking into consideration block level interactions and ensuring that under any change of operating conditions, only the "less-crucial" computations, that contribute less to block/system output quality, are affected. The proposed approach applies unequal error protection to various blocks of a system-logic and memory-and spans multiple layers of design hierarchy-algorithm, architecture and circuit. The design methodology when applied to a multimedia subsystem shows large power benefits ( up to 69% improvement in power consumption) at reasonable image quality while tolerating errors introduced due to VOS, process variations, and channel noise.

A co-operative formation-based collision avoidance approach for a group of autonomous vehicles (Special Issue on Adaptive Control and Signal Processing in Marine System)

This paper employs a unique decentralised cooperative control method to realise a formation-based collision avoidance strategy for a group of autonomous vehicles. In this approach, the vehicles' role in the formation and their alert and danger areas are first defined, and the formation-based intra-group and external collision avoidance methods are then proposed to translate the collision avoidance problem into the formation stability problem. The extension–decomposition–aggregation formation control method is next employed to stabilise the original and modified formations, whilst manoeuvring, and subsequently solve their collision avoidance problem indirectly. Simulation study verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the intra-group and external collision avoidance strategy. It is demonstrated that both formation control and collision avoidance problems can be simultaneously solved if the stability of the expanded formation including external obstacles can be satisfied.

Special section on intelligent control systems and signal processing

The IFAC International Conference on Intelligent Control Systems and Signal Processing (ICONS 2003) was organized under the auspices of the recently founded IFAC Technical Committee on Cognition and Control, and it was the first IFAC event specifically devoted to this theme. Recognizing the importance of soft-computing techniques for fields covered by other IFAC Technical Committees, ICONS 2003 was a multi-track Conference, co-sponsored by four additional Technical Committees: Computers for Control, Optimal Control, Control in Agriculture, and Modelling, Identification and Signal Processing. The Portuguese Society for Automatic Control (APCA) hosted ICONS 2003, which was held at the University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal.

Training multilayer perceptrons for control systems applications - a comparison of different approaches

Multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) (1) are the most common artificial neural networks employed in a large field of applications. In control and signal processing applications, MLPs are mainly used as nonlinear mapping approximators. The most common training algorithm used with MLPs is the error back-propagation (BP) alg. (1).

Learning control systems

Novel method of controller (PID) autotuning, involving neural networks and genetic algorithms: to employ neural networks to map the identification measures and controller parameters to objective functions, adapt these models on-line; to employ the genetic algorithm to perform on-line minimization.