船舶破舱横摇数学模型及理论分析

船舶在航行过程中有可能发生船体破损以至船体进水的情况。因此,应该考虑船舶的抗沉性和应对措施,使船舶在一定程度损伤后仍具有足够的航行能力。在对船舶对称破舱的情况进行分析的基础上,采用槽型水舱理论建立了船舶破舱后横摇的数学模型,并对不同破舱水位和流动阻尼情况下的船舶横摇特性作了仿真和分析。最后根据船舶破舱数学模型,讨论并给出了船舶破舱情况下系统的绝对稳定条件。     

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 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.     

Robust model predictive control of continuous uncertain systems*

The authors concern robust model predictive control for linear continuous systems with polytopic uncertainties and input constraints. At each sampling time, a piecewise constant control sequence is obtained by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities. The sufficient conditions on the existence of the model predictive control are given, and the robust stability of the closed-loop systems is guaranteed. A simulation example illustrates the efficiency of the proposed method.     

Participatory Sustainability Impact Assessment: Scientific Policy Advice as a Social Learning Process

This paper deals with the development of scientific policy advice by providing a methodology to foster a social learning process. The methodology, called participatory Sustainability Impact Assessment (pSIA), aims to structure complex problem situations, to clarify interests and basic assumptions, to interpret scientific studies, to develop impact assessment, and to explore sensitivity of uncertainty and lack of information. In pSIA workshops the participants are supposed to build conceptual models with different modelling methods, like System Dynamics, Value Chain Analysis, and Morphological Analysis. A case study is presented that describes a workshop series with political as well as academic actors, applying the pSIA approach to an impact assessment of Economic Partnership Agreements between the European Union and the Eastern and Southern Africa Region.

Suan Shu Shu A Book on Numbers and Computations

In December and January of 1983–1984, archaeologists excavating the tomb of an ancient Chinese provincial bureaucrat at a Western Han Dynasty site near Zhangjiashan, in Jiangling county, Hubei Province, discovered a number of books on bamboo strips, including inter alia works on legal statutes, military practice, and medicine. Among these was a previously unknown mathematical work on some 200 bamboo strips, the Suan shu shu, or Book of Numbers and Computations. Based upon other works found in the tomb, especially a copy of the Er nian lü ling (Laws and Decrees of the Second Year (of the reign of empress Lü, i.e. Lü Hou)), archaeologists have dated the tomb to ca. 186 BCE (Lü Hou’s regency lasted from 188 to 180 BCE). The Suan shu shu, as the earliest yet discovered work devoted specifically to mathematics from ancient China, has stirred considerable interest among Chinese historians of science. The translation and commentary offered here draw extensively on the works cited in Sect. 3 below. Several appendixes devoted to specific issues related to translating the Suan shu shu, including its title and the problem of determining English equivalents for various commodities that arise in the text, may be found in Appendix II. An erratum to this article can be found at     

COMPARISON OF TWO METHODS OF OPERATING THEATRE PLANNING： APPLICATION IN BELGIAN HOSPITAL

Operating Theatre is the centre of the hospital management＇s efforts. It constitutes the most expensive sector with more than 10% of the intended operating budget of the hospital. To reduce the costs while maintaining a good quality of care, one of the solutions is to improve the existent planning and scheduling methods by improving the services and surgical specialty coordination or finding the best estimation of surgical case durations. The other solution is to construct an effective surgical case plan and schedule. The operating theatre planning and scheduling is the two important steps, which aim to make a surgical case programming with an objective of obtaining a realizable and efficient surgical case schedule. This paper focuses on the first step, the operating theatre planning problem. Two planning methods are introduced and compared. Real data of a Belgian university hospital ＂Tivoli＂ are used for the experiments.     

An improved branch-and-bound algorithm to minimize the weighted flowtime on identical parallel machines with family setup times

This article investigates identical parallel machines scheduling with family setup times. The objective function being the weighted sum of completion times, the problem is known to be strongly NP-hard. We propose a constructive heuristic algorithm and three complementary lower bounds. Two of these bounds proceed by elimination of setup times or by distributing each of them to jobs of the corresponding family, while the third one is based on a lagrangian relaxation. The bounds and the heuristic are incorporated into a branch-and-bound algorithm. Experimental results obtained outperform those of the methods presented in previous works, in term of size of solved problems.     

Research on secure buyer-seller watermarking protocol

A new buyer-seller watermarking protocol is proposed by applying a double encryption method and a novel mechanism of embedding a buyer＇s watermark. The protocol can effectively prevent against collusion attacks and the man in the middle attack if the third party is not trusted. Also, based on the proposed scheme for the first-hand transaction, a new buyer-reseller watermarking protocol and a formal multi-party watermarking protocol are also proposed. The proposed buyer-resell watermarking protocol only needs the original seller to provide transfer certificate and encryption-decryption service to support the second-hand transaction, and the multi-party watermarking protocol with distributed certificate authorities can overcome the difficulty in the combination of multicast mechanism with multiple unique watermarks and allow a seller to multicast the watermarked digital contents and key transaction information to n buyers. Furthermore, the idea of zero knowledge proof is also applied into the proposed scheme to allow the seller to take an effective control on the task performed by the third party.     

Wigner-Ville distribution and cross Wigner-Ville distribution of noisy signals

The Wigner-Ville distribution （WVD） and the cross Wigner-Ville distribution （XWVD） have been shown to be efficient in the estimation of instantaneous frequency （IF）. But the statistical result of the IF estimation from XWVD peak is much better than using WVD peak. The reason is given from a statistical point of view. Theoretical studies show that XWVD of the analyzed signal can be estimated from XWVD of the noise-contaminated signal. The estimation is unbiased, and the variance is equal to that of noise. In this case, WVD cannot be estimated from W-VD of the noise-contaminated signal. Therefore, higher SNR is required when WVD is used to analyze signals.