Finding a nonnegative integer solution x for Ax = b (A Zmn, b Zm1) in Petri nets is NP-complete. Being NP-complete, even algorithms with theoretically bad worst case and with average complexity can be useful for a special class of problems, hence deserve investigation. Then a Grobner basis approach to integer programming problems was proposed in 1991 and some symbolic computation systems became to have useful tools for ideals, varieties, and algorithms for algebraic geometry. In this letter, Grobner basis approach is applied to three typical problems with respect to state equation in P/T Petri nets. In other words, after Grobner bases are derived by the tool Maple 7, we consider how to derive the T-invariants and particular solutions of the Petri nets by using them in this letter.

We investigated the intercalation of water into BaMgAl10O17:Eu2+ (BAM), a blue phosphor that is used in plasma display panels. The adsorption and desorption characteristics of water with BAM have hysteresis; showing that water is intercalated into BAM. Using thermal analysis techniques, we suggested that water hydrated to barium ions caused oxidation. We found that the water intercalated into BAM played an important role in the oxidation of Eu2+ between 450 and 600, and contributed to a 10% degradation of luminance. In contrast, oxidation due to oxygen is a principal factor in degradation above 600 through baking process in air.

Recently six conjectures on linear complexities (LC) of some Kronecker sequences of two or three component sequences are proposed by Karkkainen. In, the LC of Kronecker sequences of two component sequences were studied by Uehara and Imamura, their results are true except in the case when eb 2 or when ea = eb = 1. In this paper the LC for Kronecker sequences of two component sequences are determined completely, and it is shown that all the six conjectures are true except in some special cases, which are listed and corrected.

The performance of a GMPLS switching architecture with or without the flush capability is studied. For this switching architecture, we propose a queueing model that includes the control plane, the switch buffer mechanism, and the flush mechanism. The flush capability is included to reduce the out-of-sequence problem due to dynamic path changes. The behavior of aggregated streams, the label-setup and release policies, and the mechanisms for efficient resource allocation are all covered. With the proposed model, one can select appropriate parameters for the label-setup policy and the label-release policy to match the traffic load and network environment. Key performance metrics, such as the label-setup rate, the switching ratio, the bandwidth utilization of the label switched path, the average delay, and the average packet loss rate, can all be evaluated via this mathematical model. Numerical results and simulations are used to verify the accuracy of the proposed queueing model. Furthermore, we adopt trace simulation to certify the applicability the proposed model. The trade-off among these performance metrics can be observed as well.

Field-theoretical equivalent circuit models of a variety of coplanar waveguide (CPW) lumped-element discontinuities for two dominant modes are characterized by executing the short-open calibration (SOC) procedure in the fullwave method of moments (MoM). In our developed MoM platform, the impressed current sources with even or odd symmetry are introduced at the selected ports in order to separately excite the even and odd dominant modes, i.e., CPW- and CSL-mode. After the port network parameters are numerically derived using the Galerkin's technique, the two SOC standards are defined and evaluated in the self-consistent MoM to effectively de-embed and extract the core model parameters of a CPW circuit or discontinuity. After the validation is confirmed via comparison with the published data, extensive investigation is carried out to for the first time demonstrate the distinctive model properties of one-port CPW short- and open-end elements as well as two-port inductive and capacitive coupling elements with resorting to its two different dominant modes.

We show examples of accurate computer-aided design of power coupling between two dielectric slab waveguides of finite length by using the boundary-element method (BEM) based on guided-mode extracted integral equations (GMEIE's). The integral equations derived in this paper can be solved by the conventional BEM. Various properties in numerical calculations of GMEIE's are examined. The reflection and coupling coefficients of the guided wave as well as the scattering power are calculated numerically for the case of incidence TM guided-mode. The presented results are checked by the energy conservation law and reciprocity theorem. The results show that it is possible to design an optimum coupling between two dielectric slab waveguides by using the BEM based on GMEIE's.

Genetic algorithm (GA) is a widely used numerical technique to simplify some analytical solutions in electromagnetic theory. Genetic algorithms can be combined with the geometric optics method to tackle electromagnetic scattering problems. This paper presents an extrapolation procedure, which derived, as a first step, a functional representation of the radar cross section (RCS) of three different dielectric objects that was computed via the Mie solution or the method of moments (MOM). An algorithm was employed to fit the scattering characteristics of dielectric objects at high frequencies.

A novel hybrid numerical method, which is based on the extended spectral domain approach combined with the mode-matching method, is applied to evaluate the scattering parameter of waveguide discontinuities. The formulation procedure utilizes the biorthogonal relation in the transformation, and the Green's functions in the spectral domain are obtained easily even in the inhomogeneous lossy regions. The present method does not include the approximate perturbational scheme, and it can evaluate accurately and stably the scattering parameters of either for the thin or thick obstacles made of the wide variety of materials, the lossless dielectrics to highly conductive media, in short computation time. The physical phenomena of transmission through the lossy obstacles are investigated by numerical computations. The results are compared with FEM where FEM computations are feasible, although the FEM computations cannot cover the whole performances of the present method. The good agreement is observed in the corresponding range. The matrix size in this method is smaller than that of other methods. Therefore, the present method is numerically efficient and it would be able to apply for the integrated evaluation of a successive discontinuity. The resonant characteristics of rectangular waveguide cavity are analyzed accurately taking the conductor losses into consideration.

A two stage non-scan design for testability method is proposed. The first stage selects test points based on an earlier testability measure conflict. A new design for testability algorithm is proposed to select test points by a fault-oriented testability measure conflict+ in the second stage. Test points are selected in the second stage based on the hard faults after the initial ATPG run of the design for testability circuit in the preliminary stage. The new testability measure conflict+ based on conflict analysis of hard-faults in the process of test generation is introduced, which emulates most general features of sequential ATPG. The new testability measure reduces testability of a fault to the minimum D or controllability of the primary outputs, and therefore, does not need observability measure any more. Effective approximate schemes are adopted to get reasonable estimation of the testability measure. A couple of effective techniques are also adopted to accelerate the process of the proposed design for testability algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method gets even better results than two of the recent non-scan design for testability methods nscan and lcdft.

A novel motion vector re-estimation technique for transcoding into lower spatial resolution is proposed. This technique is based on the fact that the block matching error is proportional to the complexity of the reference block with Taylor series expansion. It is shown that the motion vectors re-estimated by the proposed method are closer to optimal ones and offer better quality than those of previous techniques.

In this paper a second order Volterra series model of an operational amplifier (opamp) circuit is presented. Such a model is suitable to the investigation of the rectification and demodulation effects of radio frequency (RF) interference superimposed on the nominal input signals and on the power supply voltage of an opamp. On the basis of the new model, some design criteria to improve the immunity of opamps to RF interference are proposed. Model predictions are verified by comparison with experimental test results.

In this paper, a novel technique using proportional current feedback is proposed to improve dynamic response of digital PWM DC-DC converters. Generally, digital controllers are implemented using microprocessors or DSPs. Additional A/D converters are required to sense feedback signals. Proposed simple structure makes it feasible to integrate both A/D converter and digital controller on a single chip. System complexity and hardware cost are therefore greatly reduced. A behavioral time domain circuit model is proposed and analyzed using MATLAB. Both simulation and experimental results showed satisfactory performance to meet power requirements of microprocessors.

This paper proposes a simulation framework suitable for holonic manufacturing systems, or HMS, based on the concept of distributed self-simulation. HMS is a distributed system that comprises autonomous and cooperative elements called holons, for the flexible and agile manufacturing. The simulation framework proposed here capitalizes on this distributed nature, where each holon functions similar to an independent simulator with self-simulation capabilities to maintain its own clock, handle events, and detect inter-holon state inconsistencies and perform rollback actions. This paper discusses the detailed architecture and design issues of such a simulator and reports on the results of a prototype.

Turbo coding is a powerful coding technique that can provide highly reliable data transmission at extremely low signal-to-noise ratios. Owing to the computational complexity of the employed decoding algorithm, the realization of turbo decoders usually takes a large amount of memory space and potentially long decoding delay. Therefore, an efficient memory management strategy becomes one of the key factors toward successfully implementing turbo decoders. This paper focuses on the development of general structures for efficient memory management of turbo decoders employing the sliding-window (Log-) MAP algorithm. Three different structures and the associated mathematic representations are derived to evaluate the required memory size, average decoding rate, and latency based on the speed and the number of the adopted processors. Comparative results show the dependency of the resulting performance based on a set of parameters; thus provide useful and general information on practical implementations of turbo decoders.

To speed up on-line analytical processing (OLAP), data warehouse, which is usually derived from operational databases, is introduced. When the operational databases happen to change, the data warehouse gets stale. To maintain the freshness of data warehouse, operational database changes need to be frequently and concurrently propagated into the data warehouse. However, if several update transactions are allowed to execute concurrently without an appropriate concurrency control, data inconsistency between data warehouse and operational databases could arise due to incorrect propagation of changes on the operational databases into the data warehouse. In this paper, we propose a new concurrency control scheme, which could execute a number of update transactions in a consistent way. Whenever an update transaction tries to update a data that is being used by OLAP transactions, our scheme allows the update transaction to create a new version of the data. To investigate the applicable areas of our scheme, its performance is evaluated by means of simulation approach. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme enables OLAP transactions to continuously read a very fresh data without wasting a lot of time to find out an appropriate version of the data from the version pool.

A two-dimensional laser beam profiler has been developed that can measure the intensity distribution on a sample surface of a single-shot of an excimer-laser light beam from not only the macroscopic viewpoint, but also the microscopic viewpoint, which is important to excimer-laser triggered lateral large-grain growth of Si. A resolution as fine as 0.4 µm was obtained with a field of view of as large as 30 µm 30 µm. The effects of homogenizers, phase-shifters, and their combination on beam profiles were quantitatively investigated by using this apparatus. The relationship between the microscopic beam profile and the surface morphology of laterally grown grains was also examined.

In speech enhancement with adaptive microphone array, the voice activity detection (VAD) is indispensable for the adaptation control. Even though many VAD methods have been proposed as a pre-processor for speech recognition and compression, they can hardly discriminate nonstationary interferences which frequently exist in real environment. In this research, we propose a novel VAD method with array signal processing in the wavelet domain. In that domain we can integrate the temporal, spectral and spatial information to achieve robust voice activity discriminability for a nonstationary interference arriving from close direction of speech. The signals acquired by microphone array are at first decomposed into appropriate subbands using wavelet packet to extract its temporal and spectral features. Then directionality check and direction estimation on each subbands are executed to do VAD with respect to the spatial information. Computer simulation results for sound data demonstrate that the proposed method keeps its discriminability even for the interference arriving from close direction of speech.

A bi-directional WDM transmission link that changes the channel-count assigned in each direction is proposed for efficiently accommodating IP traffic which is characterized by directional volume asymmetry. A novel bi-directional optical amplifier is also proposed for overcoming the problems that arise in realizing the proposed link. The asymmetric, bi-directional, repeatered WDM transmission of 8 (total) 10 Gbit/s, 50 GHz-spaced channels over eleven 50 km spans is successfully demonstrated. The experimental results clarify that, owing to the use of the proposed bi-directional amplifier, directional asymmetry in channel-count and Rayleigh backscattering do not result in any significant performance degradation. Based upon an analysis of backscattering induced impairment, we show that the total transmission loss of 1000 dB can be supported if the span loss is 20 dB.

Autonomous distributed manufacturing systems(ADMS) consist of multiple intelligent components with each component acting according to its own judgments. The ADMS objective is to realize more agile and adaptive manufacturing systems. This paper presents the introduction of context-dependent agents (CDAs) in ADMS, and switch strategies depending on system conditions to achieve better performance can be realized by agents that use the same strategies under all system conditions. For the real-time job scheduling problem, the present paper recalls a basic CDA architecture, and presents the results of an extensive empirical evaluation its performance relative to other rule-based schemes based on several common indices for real-time dispatch.

The channel noise in OFDM systems affects the accuracy of channel estimation, deteriorating the performance of equalization. We present a novel algorithm with MMSE (Minimum Mean Square Error) channel estimation based on Hadamard Transform, to mitigate the effects of noise. The performance of the proposed algorithm is proved to be better than that with LS (Least Square) estimation, and very close to that with the MMSE estimation based on Fourier Transform, while the computation required is pretty small due to the use of Hadamard Transform.