Sets and Supersets

Peer reviewed

Unpicking Priest's Bootstraps

Date of Acceptance: 13/07/2015

Sets and Supersets

Peer reviewed

Unpicking Priest's Bootstraps

Date of Acceptance: 13/07/2015

Hermes, a Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra

This thesis consists of a large composition for violoncello and orchestra, together with an analytical paper in which I discuss my compositional techniques and some of their historical antecedents. The composition draws on the genres of imaginary musical theater, the symphonic poem, and the concerto. It was also inspired by the story of Hermes, the messenger god from Greek mythology. While the myth partially informs the compositional structure, the work is ultimately meant to showcase the versatility of the cello, the coloristic range of the orchestra (in some cases emulating the orchestral styles of previous composers), the balance of cello and orchestra together, and the eclectic invocation of many compositional techniques separately and simultaneously. These techniques encompass set theory (the use of unordered pitch collections), polytonality, and serialism. It is composed in a post-romantic style.

Partner selection for reverse logistics centres in green supply chains: a fuzzy artificial immune optimization approach

The design of reverse logistics networks has now emerged as a major issue for manufacturers, not only in developed countries where legislation and societal pressures are strong, but also in developing countries where the adoption of reverse logistics practices may offer a competitive advantage. This paper presents a new model for partner selection for reverse logistic centres in green supply chains. The model offers three advantages. Firstly, it enables economic, environment, and social factors to be considered simultaneously. Secondly, by integrating fuzzy set theory and artificial immune optimization technology, it enables both quantitative and qualitative criteria to be considered simultaneously throughout the whole decision-making process. Thirdly, it extends the flat criteria structure for partner selection evaluation for reverse logistics centres to the more suitable hierarchy structure. The applicability of the model is demonstrated by means of an empirical application based on data from a Chinese electronic equipment and instruments manufacturing company.

Oil spill environmental risk assessment of stationary sources in offshore zones (Innovating a mathematical model)

Nowadays, risks arising from the rapid development of oil and gas industries are significantly increasing. As a result, one of the main concerns of either industrial or environmental managers is the identification and assessment of such risks in order to develop and maintain appropriate proactive measures. Oil spill from stationary sources in offshore zones is one of the accidents resulting in several adverse impacts on marine ecosystems. Considering a site's current situation and relevant requirements and standards, risk assessment process is not only capable of recognizing the probable causes of accidents but also of estimating the probability of occurrence and the severity of consequences. In this way, results of risk assessment would help managers and decision makers create and employ proper control methods. Most of the represented models for risk assessment of oil spills are achieved on the basis of accurate data bases and analysis of historical data, but unfortunately such data bases are not accessible in most of the zones, especially in developing countries, or else they are newly established and not applicable yet. This issue reveals the necessity of using Expert Systems and Fuzzy Set Theory. By using such systems it will be possible to formulize the specialty and experience of several experts and specialists who have been working in petroliferous areas for several years. On the other hand, in developing countries often the damages to environment and environmental resources are not considered as risk assessment priorities and they are approximately under-estimated. For this reason, the proposed model in this research is specially addressing the environmental risk of oil spills from stationary sources in offshore zones.

Problem-Based SRS: método para especificação de requisitos de software baseado em problemas

Requirements specification has long been recognized as critical activity in software development processes because of its impact on project risks when poorly performed. A large amount of studies addresses theoretical aspects, propositions of techniques, and recommended practices for Requirements Engineering (RE). To be successful, RE have to ensure that the specified requirements are complete and correct what means that all intents of the stakeholders in a given business context are covered by the requirements and that no unnecessary requirement was introduced. However, the accurate capture the business intents of the stakeholders remains a challenge and it is a major factor of software project failures. This master’s dissertation presents a novel method referred to as “Problem-Based SRS” aiming at improving the quality of the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) in the sense that the stated requirements provide suitable answers to real customer ́s businesses issues. In this approach, the knowledge about the software requirements is constructed from the knowledge about the customer ́s problems. Problem-Based SRS consists in an organization of activities and outcome objects through a process that contains five main steps. It aims at supporting the software requirements engineering team to systematically analyze the business context and specify the software requirements, taking also into account a first glance and vision of the software. The quality aspects of the specifications are evaluated using traceability techniques and axiomatic design principles. The cases studies conducted and presented in this document point out that the proposed method can contribute significantly to improve the software requirements specification.

Regular homomorphisms of minimal sets

The classification of minimal sets is a central theme in abstract topological dynamics. Recently this work has been strengthened and extended by consideration of homomorphisms. Background material is presented in Chapter I. Given a flow on a compact Hausdorff space, the action extends naturally to the space of closed subsets, taken with the Hausdorff topology. These hyperspaces are discussed and used to give a new characterization of almost periodic homomorphisms. Regular minimal sets may be described as minimal subsets of enveloping semigroups. Regular homomorphisms are defined in Chapter II by extending this notion to homomorphisms with minimal range. Several characterizations are obtained. In Chapter III, some additional results on homomorphisms are obtained by relativizing enveloping semigroup notions. In Veech's paper on point distal flows, hyperspaces are used to associate an almost one-to-one homomorphism with a given homomorphism of metric minimal sets. In Chapter IV, a non-metric generalization of this construction is studied in detail using the new notion of a highly proximal homomorphism. An abstract characterization is obtained, involving only the abstract properties of homomorphisms. A strengthened version of the Veech Structure Theorem for point distal flows is proved. In Chapter V, the work in the earlier chapters is applied to the study of homomorphisms for which the almost periodic elements of the associated hyperspace are all finite. In the metric case, this is equivalent to having at least one fiber finite. Strong results are obtained by first assuming regularity, and then assuming that the relative proximal relation is closed as well.

Superpixel-based roughness measure for multispectral satellite image segmentation

The new generation of artificial satellites is providing a huge amount of Earth observation images whose exploitation can report invaluable benefits, both economical and environmental. However, only a small fraction of this data volume has been analyzed, mainly due to the large human resources needed for that task. In this sense, the development of unsupervised methodologies for the analysis of these images is a priority. In this work, a new unsupervised segmentation algorithm for satellite images is proposed. This algorithm is based on the rough-set theory, and it is inspired by a previous segmentation algorithm defined in the RGB color domain. The main contributions of the new algorithm are: (i) extending the original algorithm to four spectral bands; (ii) the concept of the superpixel is used in order to define the neighborhood similarity of a pixel adapted to the local characteristics of each image; (iii) and two new region merged strategies are proposed and evaluated in order to establish the final number of regions in the segmented image. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the results provided by the original method when both are applied to satellite images with different spectral and spatial resolutions.

Almost Disjoint Families of Representing Sets

The thesis is concerned with a number of problems in Combinatorial Set Theory. The Generalized Continuum Hypothesis is assumed. Suppose X and K are non-zero cardinals. By successively identifying K with airwise disjoint sets of power K, a function/: X-*•K can be viewed as a transversal of a pairwise disjoint (X, K)family A . Questions about families of functions in K can thus bethought of as referring to families of transversals of A. We wish to consider generalizations of such questions to almost disjoint families; in particular we are interested in extensions of the following two problems: (i) What is the 'maximum' cardinality of an almost disjoint family of functions each mapping X into K? (ii) Describe the cardinalities of maximal almost disjoint families of functions each mapping X into K. Article in Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society 27(03):477 - 479 · June 1983  

Safe operation of transmission system considering EV at distribution level

In this paper, the IEEE 14 bus test system is used in order to perform adequacy assessment of a transmission system when large scale integration of electric vehicles is considered at distribution levels. In this framework, the symmetric/constr ained fuzzy power flow (SFPF/CFPF) was proposed. The SFPF/CFPF models are suitable to quantify the adequacy of transmission network to satisfy “reasonable demands for the transmission of electricity” as defined, for instance, in the European Directive 2009/72/EC. In this framework, electric vehicles of different types will be treated as fuzzy loads configuring part of the “reasonable demands”. With this study, it is also intended to show how to evaluate the amount of EVs that can be safely accommodated to the grid meeting a certain adequacy level.

Characterizing and Extending Answer Set Semantics using Possibility Theory

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular framework for modelling combinatorial problems. However, ASP cannot be used easily for reasoning about uncertain information. Possibilistic ASP (PASP) is an extension of ASP that combines possibilistic logic and ASP. In PASP a weight is associated with each rule, whereas this weight is interpreted as the certainty with which the conclusion can be established when the body is known to hold. As such, it allows us to model and reason about uncertain information in an intuitive way. In this paper we present new semantics for PASP in which rules are interpreted as constraints on possibility distributions. Special models of these constraints are then identified as possibilistic answer sets. In addition, since ASP is a special case of PASP in which all the rules are entirely certain, we obtain a new characterization of ASP in terms of constraints on possibility distributions. This allows us to uncover a new form of disjunction, called weak disjunction, that has not been previously considered in the literature. In addition to introducing and motivating the semantics of weak disjunction, we also pinpoint its computational complexity. In particular, while the complexity of most reasoning tasks coincides with standard disjunctive ASP, we find that brave reasoning for programs with weak disjunctions is easier.

Second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory without basis set superposition error : II : open-shell systems

The basis set superposition error-free second-order MØller-Plesset perturbation theory of intermolecular interactions was studied. The difficulties of the counterpoise (CP) correction in open-shell systems were also discussed. The calculations were performed by a program which was used for testing the new variants of the theory. It was shown that the CP correction for the diabatic surfaces should be preferred to the adiabatic ones