Norms have become a promising mechanism to ensure that open multi-agent systems (MASs) produce a desirable social outcome. MASs can be defined as societies in which autonomous agents work to achieve both societal and individual goals. Norms regulate the behavior of agents by defining permissions, obligations and prohibitions, as well as encouraging and discouraging the fulfillment of norms thro...

Database designers often point out that eager, update everywhere replication suuers from high deadlock rates, message overhead and poor response times. In this paper, we show that these limitations can be circumvented by using a combination of known and novel techniques. Moreover, we show how the proposed solution can be incorporated into a real database system. The paper discusses the new prot...

RECENTLY, THERE HAS BEEN GREATER USE OF IMPLEMENTS IN STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING THAT ALLOW ATHLETES TO COMPLETE MOVEMENTS WHILE MINIMIZING OR ELIMINATING ECCENTRIC STRESS. THE USE OF SLEDS DURING TRAINING IS AN EXAMPLE OF ONE OF THESE TOOLS THAT IS A NOVEL IMPLEMENT FOR ATHLETES STRIVING TO GAIN CONCENTRIC STRENGTH WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY DECREASING THE CHANCE OF ACQUIRING MUSCLE SORENESS. THE PUR...

The maintenance of organisation is a prerequisite for all viable systems in dynamic environments. In many living systems this organisation is, in part, achieved through coordination systems such as the nervous or endocrinic systems that can be seen as separate from the functional systems they coordinate. As software systems become more open and complex, the definition of separate organisational...

Armed with super computational ability, the most efficient attack on symmetric-key systems is an exhaustive key search. A novel encryption method with infinite key space is presented by modifying traditional book cipher. Infinite key space means the unbounded entropy of the key space, which can frustrate any exhaustive key search. Moreover, this book cipher is immune from frequency analysis. Ex...

Status of this Memo This RFC describes the use of the Ethernet Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) by subnet gateways to permit hosts on the connected subnets to communicate without being aware of the existence of subnets, using the technique of "Proxy ARP" [6]. It is based on RFC-950 [1], RFC-922 [2], and RFC-826 [3] and is a restricted subset of the mechanism of RFC-925 [4]. Distribution of thi...

The use of Feature Models (FMs) to define the valid combinations of features in Software Product Lines (SPL) is becoming commonplace. To enhance the scalability of FMs, support for composing FMs describing different SPL aspects is needed. Some composition operators, with interesting property preservation capabilities, have already been defined but a comprehensive and efficient implementation is...

BACKGROUND Primary care physicians hold a strategic position in delivering preventive services. However discrepancies exist between evidence based guidelines and practice. OBJECTIVES To assess the effects of interventions to improve the delivery of preventive services in primary care. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care Group specialised regi...

Abstract. By adopting the fuzzy control theory, a greenhouse irrigation automatic control system has been designed with the characteristic of accurate of the nonlinear, time-variability, long time delay and the characteristic of accurate mathematic model being hard to establish. Through some basic experiments, the basic domain of input and output of the fuzzy controller were ascertained. Time v...