Constrained optimization problems have a wide range of applications in science, economics, and engineering. In this paper, a neural network model is proposed to solve a class of nonsmooth constrained optimization problems with a nonsmooth convex objective function subject to nonlinear inequality and affine equality constraints. It is a one-layer non-penalty recurrent neural network based on the...

We address a rate control problem associated with a single server Markovian queueing system with customer abandonment in heavy traffic. The controller can choose a buffer size for the queuing system and also can dynamically control the service rate (equivalently the arrival rate) depending on the current state of the system. An infinite horizon cost minimization problem is considered here. The ...

Canada has many isolated communities that are not connected to the electrical grid. Most of these communities meet their electricity demand through stand-alone diesel generators. Diesel generators have economic and environmental concerns that can be minimized by using hybrid renewable energy technologies. This study aims to assess the implementation of a hybrid energy system for an off-grid com...

Unit selection speech synthesis systems generally rely on target and concatenation costs for selecting the best unit sequence. The role of the concatenation cost is to insure that joining two voice segments will not cause any acoustic artefact to appear. For this task, acoustic distances (MFCC, F0) are typically used but in many cases, this is not enough to prevent concatenation artefacts. Amon...

Opponents of the death penalty typically base their opposition on contingent features of its administration, arguing that the death penalty is applied discriminatorily, that the innocent are sometimes executed, or that there is insufficient evidence of the death penalty’s deterrent efficacy. Implicit in these arguments is the suggestion that if these contingencies did not obtain, serious moral ...

in this work, we study a unilateral contact problem with non local friction of coulombbetween a locking material and a rigid foundation. in the first step , we present the mathematicalmodel for a static process, we establish the variational formulation in the form of a variationalinequality and we prove the existence and uniqueness of the solution. in the second step, usingthe penalty method we...

Several recent studies have shown a negative association between motherhood and wages. However, an analysis of change over time in the motherhood penalty has not been conducted. Using two cohorts of young women drawn from the 1975– 1985 National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women and the 1986–1998 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we explicitly test the relationship between motherhood and ...

This paper discusses staffing under annualized hours. Staffing is the selection of the most cost-efficient workforce to cover workforce demand. Annualized hours measure working time per year instead of per week, relaxing the restriction for employees to work the same number of hours every week, To solve the underlying combinatorial optimization problem this paper develops a Cross-Entropy optimi...