Magneto-mechanical trapping systems for biological target detection

We demonstrate a magnetic microsystem capable of detecting nucleic acids via the size difference between bare magnetic beads and bead compounds. The bead compounds are formed through linking nonmagnetic beads and magnetic beads by the target nucleic acids. The system comprises a tunnel magneto-resistive (TMR) sensor, a trapping well, and a bead-concentrator. The TMR sensor detects the stray field of magnetic beads inside the trapping well, while the sensor output depends on the number of beads. The size of the bead compounds is larger than that of bare magnetic beads, and fewer magnetic beads are required to fill the trapping well. The bead-concentrator, in turn, is capable of filling the trap in a controlled fashion and so to shorten the assay time. The bead-concentrator includes conducting loops surrounding the trapping well and a conducting line underneath. The central conducting line serves to attract magnetic beads in the trapping well and provides a magnetic field to magnetize them so to make them detectable by the TMR sensor. This system excels by its simplicity in that the DNA is incubated with magnetic and nonmagnetic beads, and the solution is then applied to the chip and analyzed in a single step. In current experiments, a signal-to-noise ratio of 40.3 dB was obtained for a solution containing 20.8 nM of DNA. The sensitivity and applicability of this method can be controlled by the size or concentration of the nonmagnetic bead, or by the dimension of the trapping well.

If biological targets are present, they link magnetic beads and fluorescent beads. This results in less magnetic beads to be on the surface of magnetic sensor, causing a smaller signal, thus biological targets are detected.     

SINGLE MACHINE SCHEDULING WITH CONTROLLABLE PROCESSING TIMES AND COMPRESSION COSTS （PART I：EQUAL TIMES AND COSTS）

Most papers in scheduling research have treated individual job processing times as fixed parameters. However, in many practical situations, a manager may control processing time by realloeating resources. In this paper, authors consider a machine scheduling problemwith controllable processing times. In the first part of this paper, a special case where the pro-cessing times and compression costs are uniform among jobs is discussed. Theoretical results are derived that aid in developing an O（n^2) algorithm to slove the problem optimally. In the second part of this paper, authors generalize the discussion to general case, An effective heuristic to the genera/ problem will be presented.     

Algorithms for flows with parametric capacities

We consider the problem of finding maximal flows with respect to capacities which are linear functions of a parametert [0,T]. Since this problem is a special case of a parametric linear program the classichorizontal approach can be applied in which optimal solutions are computed for successive subintervals of [0,T]. We discuss an alternative algorithm which approximates in each iteration the optimal solution for allt [0,T]. Thisvertical algorithm is a labeling type algorithm where the flow variables are piecewise linear functions. Flow augmentations are done alongconditional flow augmenting paths which can be found by modified path algorithms. The vertical algorithm can be used to solve the parametric flow problem optimally as well as to compute a good approximation for allt if the computation of the optimal solution turns out to be too time consuming.Partially supported by NSF Grants ECS-8412926 and INT-8521433, and NATO Grant RG 85/0240.     

SINGLE MACHINE SCHEDULING WITH CONTROLLABLE PROCESSING TIMES AND COMPRESSION COSTS （Part Ⅱ Heuristics for the General Case）

A single machine scheduling problem with controllable processing times and compression costs is considered. The objective is to find an optimal sequence to minimize the cost ofcompletion times and the cost of compression. The complexity of this problem is still unknown.In Part Ⅱ of this paper,the authors have considered a special case where the compression timesand the compression costs are equal among all jobs. Such a problem appears polynomiafiy solvable by developing an O(n^2) algorithm. In this part(Part Ⅱ ),a general case where the controllable processing times and the compression costs are not equal is discussed. Authors proposehere two heuristics with the first based on some previous work and the second based on the algorithm developed in Part Ⅱ . Computational results are presented to show the efficiency and therobustness of these heuristics.     

Heuristics for vehicle routing on tree-like networks

This paper presents two new heuristics for the vehicle routing problem on tree-like road networks. These networks occur, for example, in rural road systems where the supply (or delivery) nodes are located on rural roads leading off from a few highways which form the ‘trunks’ of a tree-like network. The heuristics have the conventional objective of minimising the total distance travelled by the vehicles. The development of the heuristics takes advantage of the tree-like structure of the network. These two new heuristics and two other heuristics from the published literature are applied to some test problems and computational results are presented. The computational experience indicates that one of the new heuristics provides superior solutions to the existing heuristics and in reasonable computing time. It therefore appears suitable for large-scale practical routing problems.     

Turning restriction design in traffic networks with a budget constraint

The restriction (prohibition) of certain turns at intersections is a very common task employed by the managers of urban traffic networks. Surprisingly, this approach has received little attention in the research literature. The turning restriction design problem (TRDP) involves finding a set of turning restrictions at intersections to promote flow in a congested urban traffic network. This article uses a successive linear approximation (SLA) method for identifying approximate solutions to a nonlinear model of the TRDP. It aims to adjust the current turning restriction regime in a given network in order to minimize total user travel cost when route choice is driven by user equilibrium principles. Novel features of the method include the facts that it is based on link capacity-based arc travel costs and there is a budget constraint on the total cost of all turning restriction alterations. It has been tested using standard network examples from the literature. One of the tests utilized a multi-start approach which improved the solutions produced by the SLA method. The method was also employed to identify turning restrictions for an actual medium-sized urban traffic network in Brazil. Computational experience with the proposed method is promising.     

A fuzzy set-based approach to origin–destination matrix estimation in urban traffic networks with imprecise data

An important issue in the management of urban traffic networks is the estimation of origin–destination (O–D) matrices whose entries represent the travel demands of network users. We discuss the challenges of O–D matrix estimation with incomplete, imprecise data. We propose a fuzzy set-based approach that utilises successive linear approximation. The fuzzy sets used have triangular membership functions that are easy to interpret and enable straightforward calibration of the parameters that weight the discrepancy between observed data and those predicted by the proposed approach. The method is potentially useful when prior O–D matrix entry estimates are unavailable or scarce, requiring trip generation information on origin departures and/or destination arrivals, leading to multiple modelling alternatives. The method may also be useful when there is no O–D matrix that can be user-optimally assigned to the network to reproduce observed link counts exactly. The method has been tested on some numerical examples from the literature and the results compare favourably with the results of earlier methods. It has also been successfully used to estimate O–D matrices for a practical urban traffic network in Brazil.     

Terahertz Transmission Spectroscopy of Nonpolar Materials and Relationship with Composition and Properties

Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy is used to study properties of non-polar materials. Terahertz absorption spectra and refractive indices are measured in a number of glasses, lubricating oils, and types of paper. The results are correlated with material properties.     

Analysis of heuristics for finding a maximum weight planar subgraph

The problem of identifying a planar subgraph of maximum total weight in an edge-weighted graph has application to the layout of facilities in a production system and elsewhere in industrial engineering.This problem is NP-hard, and so we confine our attention to polynomial-time heuristics. In this paper we analyse the performance of some heuristics for this problem.     

On Center Cycles in Grid Graphs

Finding good cycles in graphs is a problem of great interest in graph theory as well as in locational analysis. We show that the center and median problems are NP-hard in general graphs. This result holds both for the variable cardinality case (i.e., all cycles of the graph are considered) and the fixed cardinality case (i.e., only cycles with a given cardinality p are feasible). Hence it is of interest to investigate special cases where the problem is solvable in polynomial time. In grid graphs, the variable cardinality case is, for instance, trivially solvable if the shape of the cycle can be chosen freely. If the shape is fixed to be a rectangle one can analyze rectangles in grid graphs with, in sequence, fixed dimension, fixed cardinality, and variable cardinality. In all cases a complete characterization of the optimal cycles and closed form expressions of the optimal objective values are given, yielding polynomial time algorithms for all cases of center rectangle problems. Finally, it is shown that center cycles can be chosen as rectangles for bounded cardinalities such that the center cycle problem in grid graphs is in these cases completely solved.