Among the many macromolecular machines involved in eukaryotic gene expression, the spliceosome remains one of the most challenging for structural biologists. Defining features of this highly complex apparatus are its excessive number of individual parts, many of which have been evolutionarily selected for regions of structural disorder, and the remarkable compositional and conformation dynamics...

Structural optimization, when approached by conventional (gradient based) minimization algorithms presents several difficulties, mainly related to computational aspects for the huge number of nonlinear analyses required, that regard both Objective Functions (OFs) and Constraints. Moreover, from the early '80s to today's, Evolutionary Algorithms have been successfully developed and applied as a ...

It is hard to statically check a system’s conformance to its runtime architectural structure. Previous approaches address the code architecture, change the language radically, mandate implementation frameworks, or use dynamic analyses that cannot check all possible program runs. We propose a static approach that supports existing object-oriented implementations, but relies on program annotation...

A very efficient methodology to carry out reliability-based optimization of linear systems with random structural parameters and random excitation is presented. The reliabilitybased optimization problem is formulated as the minimization of an objective function for a specified reliability. The probability that design conditions are satisfied within a given time interval is used as a measure of ...

The paper presents the parallel implementation of a multibody formulation for the analysis of the dynamic stability of a soft-in-plane tiltrotor configuration, with regard to the groundand airresonance phenomena. A multibody model of a tiltrotor semispan wind tunnel model has been used to investigate the phenomenon. An original multibody, multidisciplinary formulation has been used; its impleme...

A novel device, called vibrating barrier (ViBa), that aims to reduce the vibrations of adjacent structures subjected to ground motion waves is proposed. The ViBa is a structure buried in the soil and detached from surrounding buildings that is able to absorb a significant portion of the dynamic energy arising from the ground motion. The working principle exploits the dynamic interaction among v...

Frequency response functions (FRFs) play an important role in the assessment of the structural response of linear systems subjected to dynamic forces. In this work a meta-model is presented to approximate the eigenfrequencies and mode shapes to describe the FRFs. The meta-model is supposed to provide a computationally fast solution for the eigenvalue problem, which needs to be solved for each s...

This paper provides a different perspective on the firm-level empirical analysis of the relation between foreign ownership and capital demand adjustment in host countries. The author estimates a dynamic structural model of investment on a sample of 4672 Belgian firms observed between 2003 and 2010 that permits to distinguish the ‘ownership status’ of firms. He considers a dynamic discrete choic...