System optimization model of adoption of a new infrastructure with multi-resource and multi-demand sites

This study develops a conceptual system optimization model of adoption of a new infrastructure technology with multiple resource sites and multiple demand sites. With the model, this paper analyzes how the distance, spillover effect, demand, initial investment cost, and learning rate influence the adoption of the new infrastructure technology and presents optimization results of the model in different scenarios. The main findings of the study are: from the perspective of system optimization, (1) different distances among different resource-demand pairs will result in different adoption time of a new infrastructure; (2) technological spillover among different resource-demand pairs will accelerate the adoption of a new infrastructure; (3) it is hard to say that higher demand will pull faster adoption of a new infrastructure, and the optimal time of adopting of a new infrastructure is very sensitive to its technological learning rate.     

Social Media as a Mean for Improved Technical Communication

Technical communication (TC) is an important activity in order to provide the users of technical artifacts with necessary information concerning the operation and maintenance of the products they are using. In the current working procedures of TC, however, the users become too passive. They are just receivers of information. Further, there is no effective feedback from the users to the producers of the information. In order to overcome those problems we here propose an application of social media (SM) in future TC. By using SM as a complementary channel for TC it becomes possible for technology firms to boost their competitive advantage and to improve the quality and completeness of their TC. This technique, however, is still more of a potential and less of a reality. Several problems, mostly concerning security and confidentiality remain to be solved. The empirical base for this work comes from TIC, an EU-funded development project involving several Swedish technology companies. Published research results are somewhat scattered but several sources coherently indicate both the need and potential for SM as a vehicle in TC. By scanning the net it is further possible to identify a number of seemingly successful applications of SM in such applications.     

Viral journeys on the intracellular highways

Viruses are obligate intracellular pathogens that are dependent on cellular machineries for their replication. Recent technological breakthroughs have facilitated reliable identification of host factors required for viral infections and better characterization of the virus–host interplay. While these studies have revealed cellular machineries that are uniquely required by individual viruses, accumulating data also indicate the presence of broadly required mechanisms. Among these overlapping cellular functions are components of intracellular membrane trafficking pathways. Here, we review recent discoveries focused on how viruses exploit intracellular membrane trafficking pathways to promote various stages of their life cycle, with an emphasis on cellular factors that are usurped by a broad range of viruses. We describe broadly required components of the endocytic and secretory pathways, the Endosomal Sorting Complexes Required for Transport pathway, and the autophagy pathway. Identification of such overlapping host functions offers new opportunities to develop broad-spectrum host-targeted antiviral strategies.     

Cost and Service-Level-Based Model for a Seru Production System Formation Problem with Uncertain Demand

With increasing demand diversification and short product lifecycles, industries now encounter challenges of demand uncertainty. The Japanese seru production system has received increased attention owing to its high efficiency and flexibility. In this paper, the problem of seru production system formation under uncertain demand is researched. A multi-objective optimization model for a seru production system formation problem is developed to minimize the cost and maximize the service level of the system. The purpose of this paper is to formulate a robust production system that can respond efficiently to the stochastic demand. Sample average approximation (SAA) is used to approximate the expected objective of the stochastic programming. The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) is improved to solve the multi-objective optimization model. Numerical experiments are conducted to test the tradeoff between cost and service level, and how the performance of the seru production system varies with the number of product types, mean and deviation of product volume, and skill-level-based cost.     

Products Ranking Through Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis of Online Heterogeneous Reviews

With the rapid growth of online shopping platforms, more and more customers intend to share their shopping experience and product reviews on the Internet. Both large quantity and various forms of online reviews bring difficulties for potential consumers to summary all the heterogenous reviews for reference. This paper proposes a new ranking method through online reviews based on different aspects of the alternative products, which combines both objective and subjective sentiment values. Firstly, weights of these aspects are determined with LDA topic model to calculate the objective sentiment value of the product. During this process, the realistic meaning of each aspect is also summarized. Then, consumers’ personalized preferences are taken into consideration while calculating total scores of alternative products. Meanwhile, comparative superiority between every two products also contributes to their final scores. Therefore, a directed graph model is constructed and the final score of each product is computed by improved PageRank algorithm. Finally, a case study is given to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The result demonstrates that while considering only objective sentiment values of the product, the ranking result obtained by our proposed method has a strong correlation with the actual sales orders. On the other hand, if consumers express subjective preferences towards a certain aspect, the final ranking is also consistent with the actual performance of alternative products. It provides a new research idea for online customer review mining and personalized recommendation.     

Optimal Multimodel Representation by Laguerre Filters Applied to a Communicating Two Tank System

This paper presents the development of a new nonlinear representation by exploiting the multimodel approach and the new linear representation ARX-Laguerre for each operating region. The resulting multimodel, entitled ARX-Laguerre multimodel, is characterized by the parameter number reduction with a recursive representation. However, a significant reduction of this multimodel is subject to an optimal choice of Laguerre poles characterizing each local linear model ARX-Laguerre. Therefore, the authors propose an optimization algorithm to estimate, from input/output measurements, the optimal values of Laguerre poles. The ARX-Laguerre multimodel as well as the proposed optimization algorithm are tested on a continuous stirred tank reactor system (CSTR). Moreover, the authors take into account a practical validation on an experimental communicating two tank system (CTTS).     

Uncoupled PID Control of Coupled Multi-Agent Nonlinear Uncertain systems

In this paper, PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controllers will be designed to solve the tracking problem for a class of coupled multi-agent systems, where each agent is described by a second-order high-dimensional nonlinear uncertain dynamical system, which only has access to its own tracking error information and does not need to communicate with others. This paper will show that a 3-dimensional manifold can be constructed based on the information about the Lipschitz constants of the system nonlinear dynamics, such that whenever the three parameters of each PID controller are chosen from the manifold, the whole multi-agent system can be stabilized globally and the tracking error of each agent approaches to zero asymptotically. For a class of coupled first-order multi-agent nonlinear uncertain systems, a PI controller will be designed to stabilize the whole system.     

Emergence: A Systems Theory’s Challenge to Ethics

The paper reconstructs Niklas Luhmann’s diagnosis of the dysfunctional character of moral communication in the modern society by emphasizing the emergent character of today’s moral problems. In the systems-theoretic literature, emergence means the irreducibility of the properties of the whole to the characteristics of its parts. Two arguments have been advanced. First, the dysfunctional character of moral communication has been traced back to the emergent character of many moral problems. Moral communication has thus been shown to be not inherently dysfunctional, but rather needful of semantic forms that take account of the emergent properties of the economic and other social systems. Second, these properties highlight the moral aspect of the precariousness of system–environment relations as seen by Luhmann. As a moral problem, this precariousness can be resolved through greater sensitivity of social systems to their environment, social and natural alike. Accordingly, the emergent properties of the economic and other social systems can be captured by recasting the concept of responsibility as the individual-level or organizational-level projection of the environmental sensitivity of these systems.     

Bounding the inefficiency of the C-logit stochastic user equilibrium assignment

Compared with standard logit-based stochastic user equilibrium assignment model, the C-logit model describes route choice behavior in a more realistic way by considering the overlapping effect between routes. This paper investigates the inefficiency upper bounds of this model against the deterministic system optimum and the C-logit stochastic system optimum in terms of the total network travel time. It is found that the commonality factor of overlapping routes significantly affects the inefficiency bound, besides link congestion degree, total demand and the number of feasible routes. If the commonality factor is not considered, the efficiency loss resulting from selfishly stochastic travel behavior will be to large extent underestimated.