Integrating Operational and Organizational Aspects in Interdependent Infrastructure Network Recovery

Managing risk in infrastructure systems implies dealing with interdependent physical networks and their relationships with the natural and societal contexts. Computational tools are often used to support operational decisions aimed at improving resilience, whereas economics‐related tools tend to be used to address broader societal and policy issues in infrastructure management. We propose an optimization‐based framework for infrastructure resilience analysis that incorporates organizational and socioeconomic aspects into operational problems, allowing to understand relationships between decisions at the policy level (e.g., regulation) and the technical level (e.g., optimal infrastructure restoration). We focus on three issues that arise when integrating such levels. First, optimal restoration strategies driven by financial and operational factors evolve differently compared to those driven by socioeconomic and humanitarian factors. Second, regulatory aspects have a significant impact on recovery dynamics (e.g., effective recovery is most challenging in societies with weak institutions and regulation, where individual interests may compromise societal well‐being). And third, the decision space (i.e., available actions) in postdisaster phases is strongly determined by predisaster decisions (e.g., resource allocation). The proposed optimization framework addresses these issues by using: (1) parametric analyses to test the influence of operational and socioeconomic factors on optimization outcomes, (2) regulatory constraints to model and assess the cost and benefit (for a variety of actors) of enforcing specific policy‐related conditions for the recovery process, and (3) sensitivity analyses to capture the effect of predisaster decisions on recovery. We illustrate our methodology with an example regarding the recovery of interdependent water, power, and gas networks in Shelby County, TN (USA), with exposure to natural hazards.     

Applying kaizen to the schedule in a concurrent environment

Not only ETO (Engineering to Order), but even serial production industry should know how to deal with projects and their schedule: plant commissioning, shutdown, introducing new products and similar circumstances should be managed with adequate planning and resource allocation techniques to create a schedule useful in decision making during the execution. The current complex reality, with evolving technologies and fierce pressure to reach the market as soon as possible, pushes the project managers to use more advanced techniques than waterfall planning, such as agile or lean. It also requires them to take a holistic view and manage concurrent tasks in complex projects. The contributions of this paper are two: the proposal to control specific parallel groups of waterfall activities under uncertain environments, which can lead to iterations and reworks, as a single concurrent Activity Managed by Kanban Methods (AMKM). This activity can be subsequently embedded into traditional scheduling approaches as CPM-PERT. The second contribution is the feasibility of its application in industrial environments due to the affordability of simulation software. Two use cases are shown as evidence. It is not a disruptive proposal, but a kaizen action based on very mature technologies. Finally, it is suggested some improvements to be implemented in Project Management Software due to this ‘kaizen’ proposal.     

试析我国房地产投资运作模式及其发展

随着我国房地产市场由卖方市场逐渐过渡到买方市场,房地产投资运作模式由作坊生产式投资模式逐渐向社会化大生产式投资模式椎进。     

基于GPS／GSM／GIS集成的动态车辆优化调度的研究

目前,GPS(全球定位系统)、GSM(数字蜂窝移动通信系统)和GIS(地理信息系统)都是成熟的商业技术。运用这些技术,再结合Dijstra最短路和贪心算法,可合理实现单配送中心、非满载送货条件下的车辆优化调度,提高配送效率。     

反梯度推进:西部产业升级的一种思路

反梯度推进理论的核心内容强调 :落后地区要根据自己的实际情况 ,直接引进世界最先进的技术 ,发展自己的高新技术 ,带动传统产业实现超越发展。近几年 ,我国提出的西部大开发战略 ,其实质就是要解决中国区域经济的均衡协调发展问题 ,实现区域经济的跨越式发展。而实现结构优化和产业升级则是根本出路。在这方面 ,反梯度推进理论为我国西部大开发过程中的产业升级提供了非常重要的启示。     

On the Convergence of the Monte Carlo Maximum Likelihood Method for Latent Variable Models

While much used in practice, latent variable models raise challenging estimation problems due to the intractability of their likelihood. Monte Carlo maximum likelihood (MCML), as proposed by Geyer & Thompson (1992 ), is a simulation-based approach to maximum likelihood approximation applicable to general latent variable models. MCML can be described as an importance sampling method in which the likelihood ratio is approximated by Monte Carlo averages of importance ratios simulated from the complete data model corresponding to an arbitrary value of the unknown parameter. This paper studies the asymptotic (in the number of observations) performance of the MCML method in the case of latent variable models with independent observations. This is in contrast with previous works on the same topic which only considered conditional convergence to the maximum likelihood estimator, for a fixed set of observations. A first important result is that when is fixed, the MCML method can only be consistent if the number of simulations grows exponentially fast with the number of observations. If on the other hand, is obtained from a consistent sequence of estimates of the unknown parameter, then the requirements on the number of simulations are shown to be much weaker.     

一类带有分布参数系统的最佳控制

本文给出一类非均匀弦的横向振动的最佳控制，推广了P C Park的结果。这一结果同样适用于同类型振动问题。     

无抵触理论与我国公共英语教学

将无抵触理论应用于公共英语教学，可以对外语学习活动进行设计，使学习者水平与任务的难度相当、培养语言学习兴趣、加强师生交流、确保学习者获得学习主动权等，使其在学习过程中体验到巨大乐趣，进入以注意力高度集中和全身心投入为特征的无抵触心理状态，提高学习效率。     

约束优化问题的异步并行拟牛顿方法

提出了一种求解等式约束优化问题的异步并行拟牛顿方法 .若假设目标函数 f和约束函数h至少三次连续可微 ,且△h(x)对任意x∈Rn 均为满秩矩阵 ,证明了所提出的异步并行算法是 q—超线性收敛的 .     

网络工期成本优化技术

本文提出利用列表和在表上逐步进行修改,最终得到工期成本优化问题的最优解的方法。该方法的特点是直观、易于操作。