Several scienti c bottlenecks have been identi ed in existing component-based approaches. Among them, we focus on the identi cation of a relevant abstraction for the component expression and veri cation of properties like substitutivity: When is it possible to formally accept or reject the substitution of a component in a composition? This paper suggests integer weighted automata to tackle this...

C policy decisions are necessarily sequential decisions over time under uncertainty, given the magnitude of uncertainty in both economic and scientific processes, the decades-to-centuries time scale of the phenomenon, and the ability to reduce uncertainty and revise decisions along the way. Thus, an appropriate choice of analytical method is decision analysis. However, applying decision analysi...

Efficient performance tuning of parallel programs is often hard. Optimization is often done when the program is written as a last effort to increase the performance. With sequential programs each (executed) code segment will affect the completion time. In the case of a parallel program executed on a multiprocessor this is not always true, due to dependencies between the different threads. Thus,...

We consider the problem of designing the trajectory of a radar mounted on a moving platform. We develop an adaptive algorithm that, at each time step, optimally selects the radar path in response to the estimated and predicted target parameters to improve the tracking accuracy. We derive our approach under a framework of sequential Bayesian filtering. We apply a sequential Monte Carlo method (p...

The authors apply the analogy of a ‘‘black box’’ from systems theory to epidemiologic problems. They highlight this process using the example of associations between sequential measures of body size and systolic blood pressure. Several other examples of the use of structural equation modeling or path analysis are described. Finally, the authors highlight several requirements for using these met...

BACKGROUND Interventions that promote adjuvant endocrine therapy (AET) adherence are critical to improve breast cancer survival. The development of interventions would benefit from a better understanding of the reasons for adherence and the causal relationships of determinants using theoretical or model approaches. The aim of the present study was to identify reasons for AET adherence in breast...

The paper presents a novel hierarchical approach to test pattern generation for sequential circuits based on an input model of mixed-level decision diagrams. A method that handles, both, data and control parts of the design in a uniform manner is proposed. The method combines deterministic and simulation-based techniques. On the register-transfer level, deterministic path activation is combined...

An [a, b] path partition is a decomposition of the edges of a graph into a independent path sets and b matchings, where an independent path set is a set of paths that do not intersect each other. The path partition problem is related to other edge partition problems, such as edge coloring. It is shown that every graph with maximum degree 3 has a [LO] path partition, and every graph with maximum...

In highly competitive industrial market, the concept of failure analysis is an unavoidable fact in complex industrial systems. Reliability of such systems not only depends on the reliability of each element of these systems, but also depends on occurrence of sequence of failures. In this paper, a novel approach to sequential failure analysis is proposed which is based upon fuzzy logic and the c...