Search results for "programming."
showing 10 items of 3035 documents
Asset and Liability Management for Insurance Products with Minimum Guarantees: The UK Case
2006
Abstract Modern insurance products are becoming increasingly complex, offering various guarantees, surrender options and bonus provisions. A case in point are the with-profits insurance policies offered by UK insurers. While these policies have been offered in some form for centuries, in recent years their structure and management have become substantially more involved. The products are particularly complicated due to the wide discretion they afford insurers in determining the bonuses policyholders receive. In this paper, we study the problem of an insurance firm attempting to structure the portfolio underlying its with-profits fund. The resulting optimization problem, a non-linear program…
Financing of Productive Investments: A Model with Coordinated Scenarios
2015
This research raises a company that knows the cash requirements to purchase capital equipments in order to satisfy the demand for the products of each of the proposed scenarios. The company is negotiating with credit institutions a series of loans at different interest rates. Also, the company can make capital increases. A model focused on the financial needs using scenarios allows us to combine funding sources to cover the costs of the acquisition of production equipment to meet the demand for each scenario. This combination remunerates own financing, settles interest and repays the borrowed capital. The results indicate that the model is robust and minimizes the financial cost of a possib…
A Stochastic Programming Model for the Optimal Issuance of Government Bonds
2010
Sovereign states issue fixed and floating securities to fund their public debt. The value of such portfolios strongly depends on the fluctuations of the term structure of interest rates. This is a typical example of planning under uncertainty, where decisions has to be drawn on the base of the key stochastic economic factors underneath the model.We propose a multistage stochastic programming model to select portfolios of bonds, where the aim of the decision maker is that of minimizing the cost of the decision process. At the same time, we bound the conditional Value-at-Risk, a measure of risk which accounts for the losses of the tail distribution. We build an efficient frontier to trade-off…
A methodology for assessing the effect of correlations among muscle synergy activations on task-discriminating information
2013
Delis, Ioannis | Berret, Bastien | Pozzo, Thierry | Panzeri, Stefano; International audience; ''Muscle synergies have been hypothesized to be the building blocks used by the central nervous system to generate movement. According to this hypothesis, the accomplishment of various motor tasks relies on the ability of the motor system to recruit a small set of synergies on a single-trial basis and combine them in a task-dependent manner. It is conceivable that this requires a fine tuning of the trial-to-trial relationships between the synergy activations. Here we develop an analytical methodology to address the nature and functional role of trial-to-trial correlations between synergy activation…
FPGA-based embedded Logic Controllers
2014
In general case, reconfigurable logic controllers (RLC) are included into reactive digital embedded systems, carrying out control for several processes proceeding concurrently. The paper presents a practical application of a formal, rule-based specification language in Gentzen sequent logic, which is used as an intermediate textual description of a control interpreted Petri net. On the other hand exactly the same description serves also as logic design expressions, related with different versions of functionally equivalent concurrent state machine models, considered on Register Transfer Level. The symbolic rule-based specification of Petri net-based embedded Logic Controllers (LCs) can be s…
RECOGNIZABLE PICTURE LANGUAGES
1992
The purpose of this paper is to propose a new notion of recognizability for picture (two-dimensional) languages extending the characterization of one-dimensional recognizable languages in terms of local languages and alphabetic mappings. We first introduce the family of local picture languages (denoted by LOC) and, in particular, prove the undecidability of the emptiness problem. Then we define the new family of recognizable picture languages (denoted by REC). We study some combinatorial and language theoretic properties of REC such as ambiguity, closure properties or undecidability results. Finally we compare the family REC with the classical families of languages recognized by four-way a…
Density and distribution patterns of the endangered species Pinna nobilis within the harbour bay of Favignana (Egadi Islands MPA)
2015
The fan shell P. nobilis (Linnaeus, 1758) is the largest marine bivalve in the Mediterranean Sea which acts as ecosystem engineer, offering an adequate substratum to several associated benthic species. P. nobilis is threatened by the reduction and loss of its natural habitat and by increased anthropogenic inputs into coastal waters. The knowledge on the population of this species are scarce, especially as concerns Sicily and its coasts. This study focused on the density of population, spatial distribution, level of burial and orientation of the population of P. nobilis in the harbour area of Favignana island (western coast of Sicily, Italy). The fan shell surveys were carried out by SCUBA d…
Research of a Cellular Automaton Simulating Logic Gates by Evolutionary Algorithms
2003
This paper presents a method of using genetic programming to seek new cellular automata that perform computational tasks. Two genetic algorithms are used : the first one discovers a rule supporting gliders and the second one modifies this rule in such a way that some components appear allowing it to simulate logic gates. The results show that the genetic programming is a promising tool for the search of cellular automata with specific behaviors, and thus can prove to be decisive for discovering new automata supporting universal computation.
UML/OCL-based modeling of work-based access control policies for collaborative healthcare systems
2016
A work-based access control (WBAC) model is proposed by introducing the team role concept and modifying the user-role assignment model from a previous work. The main goals of WBAC are flexibility, easy manageability, security, as well as suitability to support cooperative work of dynamic teams in healthcare environments. One of the major challenges of WBAC regards authorization constraints in terms of organizational policies. In this article, we show how Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Object Constraints Language (OCL) are utilized to design and analyze the authorization constraints of WBAC in cooperative engagements with complex scenarios in the collaborative healthcare domain. We also…
Synthetic scene simulator for hyperspectral spaceborne passive optical sensors. Application to ESA's FLEX/sentinel-3 tandem mission
2014
The simulation of synthetic images serve scientists and engineers to study the instrument configuration as well as to develop image processing and retrieval strategies for a sensor in development. Despite synthetic scene simulators have been developed in the past in the frame of satellite missions, their functionality and flexibility to create a user-defined scene is limited by their architecture, design and implementation. This paper introduces the design of a generic scene simulator with the flexibility to generate realistic synthetic scenes by configuration of the surface and atmosphere. Following this generic design, a scene simulator is being developed for the ESA's Earth Explorer 8th …