1710827
A simulated annealing and hill-climbing algorithm for the traveling tournament problem
Abstract The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) [E. Easton, G. Nemhauser, M. Trick, The traveling tournament problem description and benchmarks, in: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2001, 2001, pp. 580–584; M. Trick, Challenge Traveling Tournament Problems, 2004] schedules a double round-robin tournament to minimize the total distance traveled by competing teams. It involves issues of feasibility and optimality and is a challenge to constraint and integer programming. In this work, we divide the search space and use simulated annealing (SA) to search a timetable space and hill-climbing to explore a team assignment space. The SA component mutates timetables using conditional local jumps to find timetables which lead to better schedules while hill-climbing is enhanced by pre-computation and dynamic cost updating to provide fast and efficient search. Computational experiments using this hybrid approach on benchmark sets give results comparable to or better than current best known solutions.
14381904
Scheduling sports competitions at multiple venues - Revisited
Abstract In this work, we study scheduling sports competitions at multiple venues, a problem recently introduced by Urban and Russell [T.L. Urban, R.A. Russell, Scheduling sports competitions on multiple venues, European Journal of Operational Research 148 (2003) 302–311]. The distinguishing feature of the problem is that venues come into play when scheduling. We develop beam search and simulated annealing approaches to the problem and its extension. Computational experiments were conducted and algorithms compared and analyzed. We found that the simulated annealing algorithm with specialized neighborhood moves achieved superior solutions in significantly shorter times than the method of Urban and Russell.
110721483
An Internet based virtual exhibition system: conceptual design and infrastructure
Abstract Virtual reality technology has wide applications in manufacturing, service industry, and medical training. In addition to essential presence, virtual reality provides secure and economical environment for participants to experience the virtual world rather than the corresponding real world. With advent of rapidly developed technology, there are numerous new products and projects to be introduced in exhibition shows over the world everyday and it is neither prudent nor possible to attend all of them. There have been overwhelming amount of virtual exhibitions available on the Internet; however, most of them are not satisfactory in terms of performance and users cannot get a full understanding on the product interested due to low sense of presence. Information coordination, other than information share and distribution, between the participants is crucial but not yet well defined in the current virtual exhibitions. It is prominent to develop Internet based virtual reality exhibition systems that agglomerate the advantages of efficiency/accessibility on the Internet and high sense of presence in virtual environment. The Internet based virtual exhibition systems are not only as informative as traditional exhibitions but also more flexible to relax temporal and spatial constraints to allow users attend exhibitions anytime and anywhere.
1306264
ORegAnno: an open access database and curation system for literature-derived promoters, transcription factor binding sites and regulatory variation
MOTIVATION
Our understanding of gene regulation is currently limited by our ability to collectively synthesize and catalogue transcriptional regulatory elements stored in scientific literature. Over the past decade, this task has become increasingly challenging as the accrual of biologically validated regulatory sequences has accelerated. To meet this challenge, novel community-based approaches to regulatory element annotation are required.


SUMMARY
Here, we present the Open Regulatory Annotation (ORegAnno) database as a dynamic collection of literature-curated regulatory regions, transcription factor binding sites and regulatory mutations (polymorphisms and haplotypes). ORegAnno has been designed to manage the submission, indexing and validation of new annotations from users worldwide. Submissions to ORegAnno are immediately cross-referenced to EnsEMBL, dbSNP, Entrez Gene, the NCBI Taxonomy database and PubMed, where appropriate.


AVAILABILITY
ORegAnno is available directly through MySQL, Web services, and online at http://www.oreganno.org. All software is licensed under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL).
13463425
Ontogenetic Cellular Hardware for Fault Tolerant Systems
35595997
Parallel simulation of a multi-dimensional computational fluid dynamics problem
The simulation of computational fluid dynamics problems in two and more dimensions involves computations of multiple degrees of freedom, such as the components of velocity, which are an obvious source of parallelism. Further to our previous investigation in this area we report on our current experiences in extracting such parallelism on a distributed network platform. A finite element method for simulating incompressible viscous flows is parallelised using a domain decomposition approach. Various issues that arise in this implementation are discussed in the light of our experimental results.
15371796
ACTIVE: agile coordinator testbed integrated virtual environment
This paper describes the specification, design and development of ACTIVE, a testbed for the testing and simulation of large-scale agent-based systems. ACTIVE is being developed as part of DARPA's Coordinators program. The goal of the ACTIVE testbed is to support the simulation of large collections of distributed cooperating agents in solving constrained scheduling problems.
32875582
Invariant object recognition by shape space analysis
This paper describes a new approach to invariant object recognition. In this approach, an object is represented by a set of key points called landmarks. All possible translation, scaling, and rotation of the object are placed into an equivalent class and associated to a single point in a complex projective space called the shape space. Object recognition is then achieved by distance calculations in this shape space. This approach is invariant to object translation, scaling, and rotation, and is computationally simple. Our experimental results also indicate that it is insensitive to noise and moderate occlusions.