The systems approach is a means of studying the properties of things in relation, not just to their components, but also to the ways in which the components interact, both with each other and with their environment. Within this approach, the task of ascertaining causal linkages existing among the variables in soft systems (as against hard systems) is more complex as these are often messy and th...

Soft handoff techniques in direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems provide mobile calls with seamless connections between adjacent cells. Channel reservation schemes are used to give high priority to more important soft handoff attempts over new call attempts. However, since the number of soft handoff attempts varies according to environmental conditions, fixed reservati...

This paper extends emergency management literature by developing a methodology for emergency management continuity planning (EmCP). In particular, the methodology focuses on inter-organizational continuous and coordinated planning among emergency management organizations. The authors draw on Soft Systems Methodology (Checkland & Scholes, 1999; Checkland, 2000), using it as a base for better und...

Onset detection in vocal music and many other instruments is complicated by the possibility of soft transitions between notes. Most systems try to identify onsets within a short-time window as it is easier to define transition functions over a restricted space. However, it may not be possible to detect soft onsets without considering a long-time window, for which defining and computing the tran...

Existing deep multitask learning (MTL) approaches align layers shared between tasks in a parallel ordering. Such an organization significantly constricts the types of shared structure that can be learned. The necessity of parallel ordering for deep MTL is first tested by comparing it with permuted ordering of shared layers. The results indicate that a flexible ordering can enable more effective...

This paper describes a ‘methodological experiment’ whereby some elements of Soft Systems Methodology, in particular the concept of ‘rich pictures’, have been used to support academic development work. It provides some insights into how identifying stakeholders and involving them in a collective ‘rich picture drawing’ process can be beneficial to a project of academic development. The paper also...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of soft ideal in soft set theory. The concept of soft local function is also introduced. These concepts are discussed with a view to find new soft topologies from the original one. The basic structure, especially a basis for such generated soft topologies also studied here. Finally, the notion of compatibility of soft ideals with soft topolog...

A gauge-invariant saddle point expansion for the Yang-Mills vacuum transition amplitude on the basis of the squeezed approximation to the vacuum wave functional is outlined. This framework allows the identification of gauge-invariant infrared degrees of freedom which arise as dominant sets of gauge field orbits and provide the principal input for an essentially analytical treatment of soft ampl...

Lack of effective involvement of stakeholders is one of the main drawbacks of enterprise architecture initiatives. Ongoing attempts to overcome this involve using Collaboration Engineering to develop a collaboration process that enterprise architects can execute to facilitate collaborative sessions with stakeholders during architecture creation. However, a field study evaluation of this process...

This paper describes research into utilising a Group Support System (GSS) to enable the use of the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) in distributed situations, which prohibit face-to-face application of SSM. The design goals, issues, major decisions, and initial pilot evaluation of a prototype GSS for SSM are described. 46 subjects and 2 facilitators participated in an experimental application to ...