We consider damped stochastic systems in a controlled (time-varying) quadratic potential and study their transition between specified Gibbs-equilibria states in finite time. By the second law of thermodynamics, the minimum amount of work needed to transition from one equilibrium state to another is the difference between the Helmholtz free energy of the two states and can only be achieved by a ...

This paper describes the integrity static analysis approach developed to support the justification of commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) used in a safety-related system. The static analysis was part of an overall software qualification programme, which also included the work reported in our paper presented at Safecomp 2002 [1]. Integrity static analysis focuses on unsafe language construc...

This paper concerns policy synthesis in large queuing networks. The results provide answers to the following questions: (i) It is well-known that an understanding of variability is important in the determination of safety stocks to prevent unwanted idleness. Is this the only use of high-order statistical information in policy synthesis? (ii) Will a translation of an optimal policy for the deter...

Process mining techniques rely on event logs: the extraction of a process model (discovery) takes an event log as the input, the adequacy of a process model (conformance) is checked against an event log, and the enhancement of a process model is performed by using available data in the log. Several notations and formalisms for event log representation have been proposed in the recent years to e...

Botnet detection is one of the most emerging topic recently. In this article we would like to introduce a novel method based on IP flows to detect botnets through command and control behaviors. This is a combination of both machine learning and regression, which can reduce time interval to monitor network traffic significantly.

This study offers an empirical test and extension of Gupta & Govindarajan’s typology of subsidiary roles based on knowledge inflows and outflows. A four-fold typology of subsidiary roles – global innovators, integrated players, implementors and local innovators – is tested using a sample of 169 subsidiaries of MNCs headquartered in the US, Japan, UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Results...

We propose a traffic confirmation attack on lowlatency anonymous communication protocols based on computing robust real-time binary hashes of network traffic flows. Firstly, we adapt the Coskun-Memon Algorithm to construct hashes that can withstand network impairments to allow fast matching of network flows. The resulting attack has a low startup cost and achieves a true positive match rate of ...

We consider a situation in which a home improvement project contractor has a team of regular crew members who receive compensation even when they are idle. Because both projects arrivals and the completion time of each project are uncertain, the contractor needs to manage the utilization of his crews carefully. One common approach adopted by many home improvement contractors is to accept multip...

In this short note we prove a conjecture posed in Cui et al. (2012): Dynamic mean-variance problems in arbitrage-free, complete financial markets do not allow free cash flows. Moreover, we show by investigating a benchmark problem that this effect is due to the performance criterion and not due to the time inconsistency of the strategy.

The branching space of a flow is the topological space of germs of its nonconstant execution paths beginning in the same way. However, there exist weakly Shomotopy equivalent flows having non weakly homotopy equivalent branching spaces. This topological space is then badly behaved from a computer-scientific viewpoint since weakly S-homotopy equivalent flows must correspond to higher dimensional...