Relative displacements are introduced between steel bridges and continuously welded rail (CWR) tracks as the bridge girders expand contract due to thermal effects. Depending on fastening profile CWRs girders, additional forces transmitted two, when compression at transition zones of bridge, risk track buckling increases. The aim this paper is study CWR in open-deck bridges. In order do so, a fi...

Determining the complexity of perfect information trick-taking card games is a long standing open problem. This question is worth addressing not only because of the popularity of these games among human players, e.g., DOUBLE DUMMY BRIDGE, but also because of its practical importance as a building block in state-of-the-art playing engines for CONTRACT BRIDGE, SKAT, HEARTS, and SPADES. We define ...

Micro-outsourcing is the process of sourcing work to smaller firms or individuals using online sites. Several websites provide a platform to match clients and vendors for sourcing jobs. A typical issue with micro-sourcing is information asymmetry regarding the actual expertise of vendors. Online platforms bridge this gap using vendors’ prior histories and client evaluations. In this study, we e...

In modern development schemes the processing of programs often involves an intermediate step of translation to some intermediate bytecode, complicating the verification task. Expanding on the ideas of Proof-Carrying Code (PCC), we have built a proof-transforming compiler which translates a contract-equipped program and its proof into bytecode representing both the program and the proof; before ...

Recent database research has given much attention to the specification of "flexible" transactions that can be used in interoperable systems. Starting from a quite different angle, Business Process Modelling has approached the area of communication modelling as well (the Language/Action perspective). The main goal of this paper is to provide some useful structuring mechanisms for interoperable t...

The task of planning in a dynamic and uncertain domain is considerably more challenging than in domains traditionally adopted by classical planning methods. Planning in real situations has to be 8 knowiedp intm ptoceu, particudarly since it is not easy to predict all the effects of one’s actions. However, many knowledge bated implementations are susceptible to brittleness. Contract bridge oRea ...

Assuming that a futures price is a function of the underlying asset and the basis, and that a Brownian bridge process drives the basis, this article provides the closed-form solution of futures with basis risk (FBR). The Brownian bridge process ensures that the basis is zero at the maturity of a futures contract. The FBR model is empirically tested with daily S&P500 futures data and is found to...

This paper is focused on a Double Dummy Bridge Problem (DDBP) which consists in answering the question of how many tricks are to be taken by a pair of players assuming perfect play of all four sides with all cards being revealed. Several experiments are also presented in a variant of DDBP in which the information about to whom of the two players in a given pair a particular card belongs to is h...