A Priority-Based Negotiations Approach for Handling Inconsistencies in Multi-Perspective Software Requirements

Inconsistency of multi-perspective requirements specifications is a pervasive issue during the requirements process. However, managing inconsistency is not just a pure technical problem. It is always associated with a process of interactions and competitions among corresponding stakeholders. The main contribution of this paper is to present a negotiations approach to handling inconsistencies in multi-perspective software requirements. In particular, the priority of requirements relative to each perspective plays an important role in proceeding negotiation over resolving inconsistencies among different stakeholders. An algorithm of generating negotiation proposals and an approach to evaluating proposals are also presented in this paper, respectively.     

Optimal Investment with Noise Trading Risk

This paper investigates the optimal dynamic investment for an investor who maximizes constant absolute risk aversion （CARA） utility in a discrete-time market with a riskfree bond and a risky stock. The risky stock is assumed to present both the dividend risk and the price risk. With our assumptions, the dividend risk is equivalent to fundamental risk, and the price risk is equivalent to the noise trading risk. The analytical expression for the optimal investment strategy is obtained by dynamic programming. The main result in this paper highlights the importance of differentiating between noise trading risk and fundamental risk for the optimal dynamic investment.     

Stochastic differential equations and stochastic linear quadratic optimal control problem with Lévy processes

In this paper, the authors first study two kinds of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with Lévy processes as noise source. Based on the existence and uniqueness of the solutions of these SDEs and multi-dimensional backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) driven by Lévy processes, the authors proceed to study a stochastic linear quadratic (LQ) optimal control problem with a Lévy process, where the cost weighting matrices of the state and control are allowed to be indefinite. One kind of new stochastic Riccati equation that involves equality and inequality constraints is derived from the idea of square completion and its solvability is proved to be sufficient for the well-posedness and the existence of optimal control which can be of either state feedback or open-loop form of the LQ problems. Moreover, the authors obtain the existence and uniqueness of the solution to the Riccati equation for some special cases. Finally, two examples are presented to illustrate these theoretical results. This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under Grant No. 2007CB814904, the Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 10671112 and Shandong Province under Grant No. Z2006A01, and Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China under Grant No. 20060422018.     

On the complexity of the normal bases via prime Gauss period over finite fields

A formula on the complexity of the normal bases generated by prime Gauss period over finite fields is presented in terms of cyclotomic numbers. Then, the authors determine explicitly the complexity of such normal bases and their dual bases in several cases where the related cyclotomic numbers have been calculated. Particularly, the authors ˉnd several series of such normal bases with low complexity. This research is supported by the National Fundamental Science Research Program 973 of China under Grant No. 2004 CB3180000 and the State Key Lab. (Information Security) of China.     

Bilevel programming model and solution method for mixed transportation network design problem

By handling the travel cost function artfully, the authors formulate the transportation mixed network design problem (MNDP) as a mixed-integer, nonlinear bilevel programming problem, in which the lower-level problem, comparing with that of conventional bilevel DNDP models, is not a side constrained user equilibrium assignment problem, but a standard user equilibrium assignment problem. Then, the bilevel programming model for MNDP is reformulated as a continuous version of bilevel programming problem by the continuation method. By virtue of the optimal-value function, the lower-level assignment problem can be expressed as a nonlinear equality constraint. Therefore, the bilevel programming model for MNDP can be transformed into an equivalent single-level optimization problem. By exploring the inherent nature of the MNDP, the optimal-value function for the lower-level equilibrium assignment problem is proved to be continuously differentiable and its functional value and gradient can be obtained efficiently. Thus, a continuously differentiable but still nonconvex optimization formulation of the MNDP is created, and then a locally convergent algorithm is proposed by applying penalty function method. The inner loop of solving the subproblem is mainly to implement an all-or-nothing assignment. Finally, a small-scale transportation network and a large-scale network are presented to verify the proposed model and algorithm. This research is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China under Grant No. 2006CB705500, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 0631001, the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University, and Volvo Research and Educational Foundations.     

Inverse Center Location Problem on a Tree

This paper discusses the inverse center location problem restricted on a tree with different costs and bound constraints. The authors first show that the problem can be formulated as a series of combinatorial linear programs, then an O（｜V｜^2 log ｜V｜） time algorithm to solve the problem is presented. For the equal cost case, the authors further give an O（｜V｜） time algorithm.     

Web Services Composing by Multiagent Negotiation

Composing web services is gained daily attention in Service Oriented Computing. It includes the dynamic discovery, interaction and coordination of agent-based semantic web services. The authors first follow Function Ontology and Automated Mechanism Design for service agents aggregating. Then the problem is formulated but it is ineffective to solve it from the traditional global view. Because the complexity is NP-complete and it is dii~cult or even impossible to get some personal information. This paper provides a multi-agent negotiation idea in which each participant negotiates under the condition of its reservation payoff being satisfied. Numerical experiment is given and well evaluates the negotiation.     

Designing a Hybrid Intelligent Mining System for Credit Risk Evaluation

In this study, a novel hybrid intelligent mining system integrating rough sets theory and support vector machines is developed to extract efficiently association rules from original information table for credit risk evaluation and analysis. In the proposed hybrid intelligent system, support vector machines are used as a tool to extract typical features and filter its noise, which are different from the previous studies where rough sets were only used as a preprocessor for support vector machines. Such an approach could reduce the information table and generate the final knowledge from the reduced information table by rough sets. Therefore, the proposed hybrid intelligent system overcomes the difficulty of extracting rules from a trained support vector machine classifier and possesses the robustness which is lacking for rough-set-based approaches. In addition, the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid intelligent system is illustrated with two real-world credit datasets.     

Remarks on Network Community Properties

This paper discusses a popular community definition in complex network research in terms of the conditions under which a community is minimal, that is, the community cannot be split into several smaller communities or split and reorganized with other network elements into new communities. The result provides a base on which further optimization computation of the quantitative measure for community identification can be realized.     

Testing serial correlation in semiparametric varying coefficient partially linear errors-in-variables model

The authors propose a V _{N, p} test statistic for testing finite-order serial correlation in a semiparametric varying coefficient partially linear errors-in-variables model. The test statistic is shown to have asymptotic normal distribution under the null hypothesis of no serial correlation. Some Monte Carlo experiments are conducted to examine the finite sample performance of the proposed V _{N, p} test statistic. Simulation results confirm that the proposed test performs satisfactorily in estimated size and power. This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 10871217 and 40574003; the Science and Technology Project of Chongqing Education Committee under Grant No. KJ080609; the Doctor's Start-up Research Fund under Grant No. 08-52204; and the Youth Science Research Fund of Chongqing Technology and Business University under Grant No. 0852008.     

PDE-Based Medial Axis Extraction and Shape Manipulation of Arbitrary Meshes

Shape skeletonization （i.e., medial axis extraction） is powerful in many visual computing applications, such as pattern recognition, object segmentation, registration, and animation. In this paper, the authors expand the use of diffusion equations combined with distance field information to approximate medial axes of arbitrary 3D differential properties. It offers an alternative solids represented by polygonal meshes based on their but natural way for medial axis extraction for commonly used 3D polygonal models. By solving the PDE along time axis, this system can not only quickly extract diffusion-based medial axes of input meshes, but also allow users to visualize the extraction process at each time step. In addition, the proposed model provides users a set of manipulation toolkits to sculpt extracted medial axes, then use diffusion-based techniques to recover corresponding deformed shapes according to the original input datasets. This skeleton-based shape manipulation offers a fast and easy way for animation and deformation of complicated mesh objects.     

The projective plane crossing numbers of circular graphs*

The authors give an upper bound for the projective plane crossing number of a circular graph. Also, the authors prove the projective plane crossing numbers of circular graph C （8, 3） and C （9, 3） are 2 and 1, respectively.     

Discovery of latent structures: Experience with the CoIL Challenge 2000 data set*

The authors present a case study to demonstrate the possibility of discovering complex and interesting latent structures using hierarchical latent class （HLC） models. A similar effort was made earlier by Zhang （2002）, but that study involved only small applications with 4 or 5 observed variables and no more than 2 latent variables due to the lack of efficient learning algorithms. Significant progress has been made since then on algorithmic research, and it is now possible to learn HLC models with dozens of observed variables. This allows us to demonstrate the benefits of HLC models more convincingly than before. The authors have successfully analyzed the CoIL Challenge 2000 data set using HLC models. The model obtained consists of 22 latent variables, and its structure is intuitively appealing. It is exciting to know that such a large and meaningful latent structure can be automatically inferred from data.     

Cluster Synchronization in a Complex Dynamical Network with Two Nonidentical Clusters

This paper further investigates cluster synchronization in a complex dynamical network with two-cluster. Each cluster contains a number of identical dynamical systems, however, the subsystems composing the two clusters can be different, i.e., the individual dynamical system in one cluster can differ from that in the other cluster. Complete synchronization within each cluster is possible only if each node from one cluster receives the same input from nodes in other cluster. In this case, the stability condition of one-cluster synchronization is known to contain two terms： the first accounts for the contribution of the inner-cluster coupling structure while the second is simply an extra linear term, which can be deduced by the ＂same-input＂ condition. Applying the connection graph stability method, the authors obtain an upper bound of input strength for one cluster if the first account is known, by which the synchronizability of cluster can be scaled. For different clusters, there are different upper bound of input strength by virtue of different dynamics and the corresponding cluster structure. Moreover, two illustrative examples are presented and the numerical simulations coincide with the theoretical analysis.     

A multiyear lags input-holding-output model on education with excluding idle capital

This paper develops a multi-year lag Input-Holding-Output (I-H-O) Model on education with exclusion of the idle capital to address the reasonable education structure in support of a sustainable development strategy in China. First, the model considers the multiyear lag of human capital because the lag time of human capital is even longer and more important than that of fixed capital. Second, it considers the idle capital resulting from the output decline in education, for example, student decrease in primary school. The new generalized Leonitief dynamic inverse is deduced to obtain a positive solution on education when output declines as well as expands. After compiling the 2000 I-H-O table on education, the authors adopt modifications-by-step method to treat nonlinear coefficients, and calculate education scale, the requirement of human capital, and education expenditure from 2005 to 2020. It is found that structural imbalance of human capital is a serious problem for Chinese economic development. This research was supporting by the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60874119, Innovation Funds of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Research Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences in colleges under Grant No. 06BJY102, Key project in Jiangxi Soft Science Project under Grant No. [2006]188, Jiangxi Research Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences in colleges under Grant No. 03JJ01, and Henan Research Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences in colleges under Grant No. 2008-ZD-002.     

Estimation on semivarying coefficient models with different degrees of smoothness

Semivarying coefficient models are frequently used in statistical models. In this paper, under the condition that the coefficient functions possess different degrees of smoothness, a two-step method is proposed. In the case, one-step method for the smoother coefficient functions cannot be optimal. This drawback can be repaired by using the two-step estimation procedure. The asymptotic mean-squared error for the two-step procedure is obtained and is shown to achieve the optimal rate of convergence. A few simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the proposed estimation methods. This research is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 10871072 and Shanxi's Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 2007011014.     

Symmetry in world trade network

Symmetry of the world trade network provides a novel perspective to understand the world-wide trading system. However, symmetry in the world trade network (WTN) has been rarely studied so far. In this paper, the authors systematically explore the symmetry in WTN. The authors construct WTN in 2005 and explore the size and structure of its automorphism group, through which the authors find that WTN is symmetric, particularly, locally symmetric to a certain degree. Furthermore, the authors work out the symmetric motifs of WTN and investigate the structure and function of the symmetric motifs, coming to the conclusion that local symmetry will have great effect on the stability of the WTN and that continuous symmetry-breakings will generate complexity and diversity of the trade network. Finally, utilizing the local symmetry of the network, the authors work out the quotient of WTN, which is the structural skeleton dominating stability and evolution of WTN. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 70371070; Shanghai Leading Academic Discipline Project under Grant No. S30504; and Key Project for Fundamental Research of STCSM under Grant No. 06JC14057.     

A STAGE-STRUCTURED SI ECO-EPIDEMIOLOGICAL MODEL WITH TIME DELAY AND IMPULSIVE CONTROLLING*

This paper formulates a robust stage-structured SI eco-epidemiological model with periodic constant pulse releasing of infectious pests with pathogens. The authors show that the conditions for global attractivity of the ＇pest-eradication＇ periodic solution and permanence of the system depend on time delay, hence, the authors call it ＂profitless＂. Further, the authors present a pest management strategy in which the pest population is kept under the economic threshold level （ETL） when the pest population is uniformly persistent. By numerical analysis, the authors also show that constant maturation time delay for the susceptible pests and pulse releasing of the infectious pests can bring obvious effects on the dynamics of system.     

THE M/M/c QUEUE WITH （e,d） SETUP TIME

The authors present a new queueing model with （e, d） setup time. Using the quasi-birth-and-death process and matrix-geometric method, the authors obtain the stationary distribution of queue length and the LST of waiting time of a customer in the system. Furthermore, the conditional stochastic decomposition results of queue length and waiting time are given.