The growing regional and global interests in legume crops for cover cropping sustainable agriculture has provided new opportunities growers to incorporate faba bean (Vicia L.) into their production systems. Much of bean's potential, especially the western United States, is rooted its high N fixation potential compared with other cultivated legumes. However, currently hindered by existing market...

this paper proposes a novel hybrid algorithm namely apso-bfo which combines merits of bacterial foraging optimization (bfo) algorithm and adaptive particle swarm optimization (apso) algorithm to determine the optimal pid parameters for control of nonlinear systems. to balance between exploration and exploitation, the proposed hybrid algorithm accomplishes global search over the whole search spa...

The paper illustrates the application of a combined adaptive particle swarm optimization (A-PSO) algorithm and the finite strip method (FSM) to the lay-up optimization of symmetrically fiber-metal laminated (FML) composite shallow shell panels for maximizing the fundamental frequency. To improve the speed of the optimization process, adaptive inertia weight was used in the particle swarm optimiz...

A direct search algorithm is proposed for minimizing an arbitrary real valued function. The algorithm uses a new function transformation and three simplex-based operations. The function transformation provides global exploration features, while the simplex-based operations guarantees the termination of the algorithm and provides global convergence to a stationary point if the cost function is d...

Examining the relevance of 'animal personality' involves linking consistent among- and within-individual behavioural variation to fitness in the wild. Studies aiming to do this typically assay personality in captivity and rely on the assumption that measures of traits in the laboratory reflect their expression in nature. We examined this rarely tested assumption by comparing laboratory and fiel...

The multi-robot exploration problem is to explore an unknown graph of size n and depth d with k robots starting from the same node. For known graphs a traversal of all nodes takes at most O(d + n/k) steps. The ratio between the time until cooperating robots explore an unknown graph and the optimal traversal of a known graph is called the competitive exploration time ratio. It is known that for ...