Evolutionary Technique of Shorter Route Determination of Fire Brigade Following to Fire Place with the Optimized Space of Search

In this paper the technique of shorter route determination of fire engine to the fire place on time minimization criterion with the use of evolutionary modeling is offered. The algorithm of its realization on the base of complete and optimized space of search of possible decisions is explored. The aspects of goal function forming and program realization of method having a special purpose are considered. Experimental verification is executed and the results of comparative analysis with the expert conclusions are considered.

An agent-based model of team coordination and performance

This research is based on the premises that teams can be designed to optimize its performance, and appropriate team coordination is a significant factor to team outcome performance. Contingency theory argues that the effectiveness of a team depends on the right fit of the team design factors to the particular job at hand. Therefore, organizations need computational tools capable of predict the performance of different configurations of teams. This research created an agent-based model of teams called the Team Coordination Model (TCM). The TCM estimates the coordination load and performance of a team, based on its composition, coordination mechanisms, and job’s structural characteristics. The TCM can be used to determine the team’s design characteristics that most likely lead the team to achieve optimal performance. The TCM is implemented as an agent-based discrete-event simulation application built using JAVA and Cybele Pro agent architecture. The model implements the effect of individual team design factors on team processes, but the resulting performance emerges from the behavior of the agents. These team member agents use decision making, and explicit and implicit mechanisms to coordinate the job. The model validation included the comparison of the TCM’s results with statistics from a real team and with the results predicted by the team performance literature. An illustrative 26-1 fractional factorial experimental design demonstrates the application of the simulation model to the design of a team. The results from the ANOVA analysis have been used to recommend the combination of levels of the experimental factors that optimize the completion time for a team that runs sailboats races. This research main contribution to the team modeling literature is a model capable of simulating teams working on complex job environments. The TCM implements a stochastic job structure model capable of capturing some of the complexity not capture by current models. In a stochastic job structure, the tasks required to complete the job change during the team execution of the job. This research proposed three new types of dependencies between tasks required to model a job as a stochastic structure. These dependencies are conditional sequential, single-conditional sequential, and the merge dependencies.

Using sonic enhancement to augment non-visual tabular navigation

More information is now readily available to computer users than at any time in human history; however, much of this information is often inaccessible to people with blindness or low-vision, for whom information must be presented non-visually. Currently, screen readers are able to verbalize on-screen text using text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis; however, much of this vocalization is inadequate for browsing the Internet. An auditory interface that incorporates auditory-spatial orientation was created and tested. For information that can be structured as a two-dimensional table, links can be semantically grouped as cells in a row within an auditory table, which provides a consistent structure for auditory navigation. An auditory display prototype was tested.^ Sixteen legally blind subjects participated in this research study. Results demonstrated that stereo panning was an effective technique for audio-spatially orienting non-visual navigation in a five-row, six-column HTML table as compared to a centered, stationary synthesized voice. These results were based on measuring the time- to-target (TTT), or the amount of time elapsed from the first prompting to the selection of each tabular link. Preliminary analysis of the TTT values recorded during the experiment showed that the populations did not conform to the ANOVA requirements of normality and equality of variances. Therefore, the data were transformed using the natural logarithm. The repeated-measures two-factor ANOVA results show that the logarithmically-transformed TTTs were significantly affected by the tonal variation method, F(1,15) = 6.194, p= 0.025. Similarly, the results show that the logarithmically transformed TTTs were marginally affected by the stereo spatialization method, F(1,15) = 4.240, p=0.057. The results show that the logarithmically transformed TTTs were not significantly affected by the interaction of both methods, F(1,15) = 1.381, p=0.258. These results suggest that some confusion may be caused in the subject when employing both of these methods simultaneously. The significant effect of tonal variation indicates that the effect is actually increasing the average TTT. In other words, the presence of preceding tones increases task completion time on average. The marginally-significant effect of stereo spatialization decreases the average log(TTT) from 2.405 to 2.264.^

Dynamic job quoting system for printed circuit board fabrication

This research deals with the development of a dynamic job quotation system for printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication, which can estimate the price and completion time of a job based on customer preference and current capacity of the shop floor. The primary purpose of building a dynamic quotation system is to maximize the company's profit by quoting optimum lead-time and competitive price for the day-to-day orders received from different customers and original equipment manufacturers. The system was developed using MS-Access relational database. Evaluating the output of the system it was observed that the dynamic system provided more reliable estimation of the lead-time needed for fabricating new jobs. The overall price quoted by the system was competitive with higher profit margin when compared to traditional static systems. This system would therefore provide a vital link between the job quoting and scheduling system of the firm enabling better utilization of the available resources.

3D navigation with six degrees-of-freedom using a multi-touch display

With the introduction of new input devices, such as multi-touch surface displays, the Nintendo WiiMote, the Microsoft Kinect, and the Leap Motion sensor, among others, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) finds itself at an important crossroads that requires solving new challenges. Given the amount of three-dimensional (3D) data available today, 3D navigation plays an important role in 3D User Interfaces (3DUI). This dissertation deals with multi-touch, 3D navigation, and how users can explore 3D virtual worlds using a multi-touch, non-stereo, desktop display. ^ The contributions of this dissertation include a feature-extraction algorithm for multi-touch displays (FETOUCH), a multi-touch and gyroscope interaction technique (GyroTouch), a theoretical model for multi-touch interaction using high-level Petri Nets (PeNTa), an algorithm to resolve ambiguities in the multi-touch gesture classification process (Yield), a proposed technique for navigational experiments (FaNS), a proposed gesture (Hold-and-Roll), and an experiment prototype for 3D navigation (3DNav). The verification experiment for 3DNav was conducted with 30 human-subjects of both genders. The experiment used the 3DNav prototype to present a pseudo-universe, where each user was required to find five objects using the multi-touch display and five objects using a game controller (GamePad). For the multi-touch display, 3DNav used a commercial library called GestureWorks in conjunction with Yield to resolve the ambiguity posed by the multiplicity of gestures reported by the initial classification. The experiment compared both devices. The task completion time with multi-touch was slightly shorter, but the difference was not statistically significant. The design of experiment also included an equation that determined the level of video game console expertise of the subjects, which was used to break down users into two groups: casual users and experienced users. The study found that experienced gamers performed significantly faster with the GamePad than casual users. When looking at the groups separately, casual gamers performed significantly better using the multi-touch display, compared to the GamePad. Additional results are found in this dissertation.^

Bounds on end-to-end performance of networks employing erasure control coding

Erasure control coding has been exploited in communication networks with an aim to improve the end-to-end performance of data delivery across the network. To address the concerns over the strengths and constraints of erasure coding schemes in this application, we examine the performance limits of two erasure control coding strategies, forward erasure recovery and adaptive erasure recovery. Our investigation shows that the throughput of a network using an (n, k) forward erasure control code is capped by r =k/n when the packet loss rate p ≤ (te/n) and by k(l-p)/(n-te) when p > (t e/n), where te is the erasure control capability of the code. It also shows that the lower bound of the residual loss rate of such a network is (np-te)/(n-te) for (te/n) < p ≤ 1. Especially, if the code used is maximum distance separable, the Shannon capacity of the erasure channel, i.e. 1-p, can be achieved and the residual loss rate is lower bounded by (p+r-1)/r, for (1-r) < p ≤ 1. To address the requirements in real-time applications, we also investigate the service completion time of different schemes. It is revealed that the latency of the forward erasure recovery scheme is fractionally higher than that of the scheme without erasure control coding or retransmission mechanisms (using UDP), but much lower than that of the adaptive erasure scheme when the packet loss rate is high. Results on comparisons between the two erasure control schemes exhibit their advantages as well as disadvantages in the role of delivering end-to-end services. To show the impact of the bounds derived on the end-to-end performance of a TCP/IP network, a case study is provided to demonstrate how erasure control coding could be used to maximize the performance of practical systems. © 2010 IEEE.

3D Navigation with Six Degrees-of-Freedom using a Multi-Touch Display

With the introduction of new input devices, such as multi-touch surface displays, the Nintendo WiiMote, the Microsoft Kinect, and the Leap Motion sensor, among others, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) finds itself at an important crossroads that requires solving new challenges. Given the amount of three-dimensional (3D) data available today, 3D navigation plays an important role in 3D User Interfaces (3DUI). This dissertation deals with multi-touch, 3D navigation, and how users can explore 3D virtual worlds using a multi-touch, non-stereo, desktop display. The contributions of this dissertation include a feature-extraction algorithm for multi-touch displays (FETOUCH), a multi-touch and gyroscope interaction technique (GyroTouch), a theoretical model for multi-touch interaction using high-level Petri Nets (PeNTa), an algorithm to resolve ambiguities in the multi-touch gesture classification process (Yield), a proposed technique for navigational experiments (FaNS), a proposed gesture (Hold-and-Roll), and an experiment prototype for 3D navigation (3DNav). The verification experiment for 3DNav was conducted with 30 human-subjects of both genders. The experiment used the 3DNav prototype to present a pseudo-universe, where each user was required to find five objects using the multi-touch display and five objects using a game controller (GamePad). For the multi-touch display, 3DNav used a commercial library called GestureWorks in conjunction with Yield to resolve the ambiguity posed by the multiplicity of gestures reported by the initial classification. The experiment compared both devices. The task completion time with multi-touch was slightly shorter, but the difference was not statistically significant. The design of experiment also included an equation that determined the level of video game console expertise of the subjects, which was used to break down users into two groups: casual users and experienced users. The study found that experienced gamers performed significantly faster with the GamePad than casual users. When looking at the groups separately, casual gamers performed significantly better using the multi-touch display, compared to the GamePad. Additional results are found in this dissertation.

Workflow scheduling on distributed systems

Growing evidence shows that in obtaining high performance, a well-managed time-constrained workflow scheduling is needed. Efficient workflow scheduling is critical for achieving high performance especially in heterogeneous computing system. However, it is a great challenge to improve performance and to optimize several objectives simultaneously. We propose a workflow scheduling algorithm that minimizes the makespan of the workflow application modeled by a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). The new proposed scheduling algorithm is named Multi Dependency Joint (MDJ) Algorithm. The performance of MDJ is compared with existing algorithms such as, Highest Level First with Estimated Time (HLFET), Modified Critical Path (MCP) and Earliest Time First (ETF). As a result, the experiments show that our proposed MDJ algorithm outperforms HLEFT, MCP, and EFT with a 7% lower overall completion time.

Providing fairer resource allocation for multi-tenant cloud-based systems

A fundamental premise in cloud computing is trying to provide a more sophisticated computing resource sharing capability. In order to provide better allocation, the Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF) approach has been developed to address the "fair resource allocation problem" at the application layer for multi-tenant cloud applications. Nevertheless conventional DRF only considers the interplay of CPU and memory, which may result in over allocation of resources to one tenant's application to the detriment of others. In this paper, we propose an improved DRF algorithm with 3-dimensional demand vector to support disk resources as the third dominant shared resource, enhancing fairer resource sharing. Our technique is integrated with LINUX 'group' controls resource utilisation and realises data isolation to avoid undesirable interactions between co-located tasks. Our method ensures all tenants receive system resources fairly, which improves overall utilisation and throughput as well as reducing traffic in an over-crowded system. We evaluate the performance of different types of workload using different algorithms and compare ours to the default algorithm. Results show an increase of 15% resource utilisation and a reduction of 59% completion time on average, indicating that our DRF algorithm provides a better, smoother, fairer high-performance resource allocation scheme for both continuous workloads and batch jobs.

Information-agnostic coflow scheduling with optimal demotion thresholds

Previous coflow scheduling proposals improve the coflow completion time (CCT) over per-flow scheduling based on prior information of coflows, which makes them hard to apply in practice. State-of-art information-agnostic coflow scheduling solution Aalo adopts Discretized Coflow-aware Least-Attained-Service (D-CLAS) to gradually demote coflows from the highest priority class into several lower priority classes when their sent-bytes-count exceeds several predefined demotion thresholds. However, current design standards of these demotion thresholds are crude because they do not analyze the impacts of different demotion thresholds on the average coflow delay. In this paper, we model the D-CLAS system by an M/G/1 queue and formulate the average coflow delay as a function of the demotion thresholds. In addition, we prove the valley-like shape of the function and design the Down-hill searching (DHS) algorithm. The DHS algorithm locates a set of optimal demotion thresholds which minimizes the average coflow delay in the system. Real-data-center-trace driven simulations indicate that DHS improves average CCT up to 6.20&times; over Aalo.

A dynamic pricing reverse auction-based resource allocation mechanism in cloud workflow systems

Market-oriented reverse auction is an efficient and cost-effective method for resource allocation in cloud workflow systems since it can dynamically allocate resources depending on the supply-demand relationship of the cloud market. However, during the auction the price of cloud resource is usually fixed, and the current resource allocation mechanisms cannot adapt to the changeable market properly which results in the low efficiency of resource utilization. To address such a problem, a dynamic pricing reverse auction-based resource allocation mechanism is proposed. During the auction, resource providers can change prices according to the trading situation so that our novel mechanism can increase the chances of making a deal and improve efficiency of resource utilization. In addition, resource providers can improve their competitiveness in the market by lowering prices, and thus users can obtain cheaper resources in shorter time which would decrease monetary cost and completion time for workflow execution. Experiments with different situations and problem sizes are conducted for dynamic pricing-based allocation mechanism (DPAM) on resource utilization and the measurement of Time∗Cost (TC). The results show that our DPAM can outperform its representative in resource utilization, monetary cost, and completion time and also obtain the optimal price reduction rates.

Towards practical and near-optimal coflow scheduling for data center networks

In current data centers, an application (e.g., MapReduce, Dryad, search platform, etc.) usually generates a group of parallel flows to complete a job. These flows compose a coflow and only completing them all is meaningful to the application. Accordingly, minimizing the average Coflow Completion Time (CCT) becomes a critical objective of flow scheduling. However, achieving this goal in today's Data Center Networks (DCNs) is quite challenging, not only because the schedule problem is theoretically NP-hard, but also because it is tough to perform practical flow scheduling in large-scale DCNs. In this paper, we find that minimizing the average CCT of a set of coflows is equivalent to the well-known problem of minimizing the sum of completion times in a concurrent open shop. As there are abundant existing solutions for concurrent open shop, we open up a variety of techniques for coflow scheduling. Inspired by the best known result, we derive a 2-approximation algorithm for coflow scheduling, and further develop a decentralized coflow scheduling system, D-CAS, which avoids the system problems associated with current centralized proposals while addressing the performance challenges of decentralized suggestions. Trace-driven simulations indicate that D-CAS achieves a performance close to Varys, the state-of-the-art centralized method, and outperforms Baraat, the only existing decentralized method, significantly.

Why fly the extra mile? Latitudinal trend in migratory fuel deposition rate as driver of trans-equatorial long-distance migration.

Trans-equatorial long-distance migrations of high-latitude breeding animals have been attributed to narrow ecological niche widths. We suggest an alternative hypothesis postulating that trans-equatorial migrations result from a possible increase in the rate at which body stores to fuel migration are deposited with absolute latitude; that is, longer, migrations away from the breeding grounds surpassing the equator may actually enhance fueling rates on the nonbreeding grounds and therewith the chance of a successful, speedy and timely migration back to the breeding grounds. To this end, we first sought to confirm the existence of a latitudinal trend in fuel deposition rate in a global data set of free-living migratory shorebirds and investigated the potential factors causing this trend. We next tested two predictions on how this trend is expected to impact the migratory itineraries on northward migration under the time-minimization hypothesis, using 56 tracks of high-latitude breeding shorebirds migrating along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. We found a strong positive effect of latitude on fuel deposition rate, which most likely relates to latitudinal variations in primary productivity and available daily foraging time. We next confirmed the resulting predictions that (1) when flying from a stopover site toward the equator, migrants use long jumps that will take them to an equivalent or higher latitude at the opposite hemisphere; and (2) that from here onward, migrants will use small steps, basically fueling only enough to make it to the next suitable staging site. These findings may explain why migrants migrate "the extra mile" across the equator during the nonbreeding season in search of better fueling conditions, ultimately providing secure and fast return migrations to the breeding grounds in the opposite hemisphere.

On Minimization of Test Application Time for RAS

Conventional Random access scan (RAS) for testing has lower test application time, low power dissipation, and low test data volume compared to standard serial scan chain based design In this paper, we present two cluster based techniques, namely, Serial Input Random Access Scan and Variable Word Length Random Access Scan to reduce test application time even further by exploiting the parallelism among the clusters and performing write operations on multiple bits Experimental results on benchmarks circuits show on an average 2-3 times speed up in test write time and average 60% reduction in write test data volume