PORTFOLIO OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES FOR A MIXED‐GRAZING SCENARIO FOR AUSTRALIA'S RANGELANDS

Abstract Currently pastoralists in Australia view native mammal species as one of many variables that impact, usually negatively, on their productivity and therefore profitability. This does not necessarily have to be the case. The species with the largest impact, kangaroos, have a value that could be incorporated into their income stream as a method of both reducing risk and increasing biodiversity, and therefore increasing resilience. An investigation of the idea of optimally allocating stocking rates using techniques analogous to classical portfolio selection optimization is conducted. Using historical pricing data for beef, wool, and kangaroo meat, an efficient frontier is formed to analyze the best scenario dependent on an investors risk aversion. It is shown that there is a clear opportunity for pastoralists to benefit economically by the inclusion of kangaroos in a mixed‐grazing strategy for Australian rangelands.     

道路约束条件下的移动机器人跟踪

为提高移动机器人的位置估计精度和跟踪效果,提出一种基于道路约束条件下的移动机器人鲁棒约束H∞滤波(CHF)跟踪算法.首先,将机器人移动的道路网络作为跟踪的约束条件,并利用当前统计模型对机器人的运动进行建模.其次,将道路约束条件作为机器人跟踪的非线性状态约束,利用最小协方差估计推导了鲁棒CHF递推方程.通过拉格朗日乘子法对非线性约束优化估计问题进行求解,并利用约束信息对CHF算法的状态更新过程进行了改进.最后,通过对CHF算法和无约束的H∞滤波算法的跟踪性能进行了对比分析和验证.仿真结果表明,该算法可以实现机器人的跟踪,且跟踪精度优于HF算法.     

Numerical simulation of 2D lid‐driven cavity flow with CLEARER algorithm on extremely highly skewed grids at high Reynolds numbers

It is crucial to deal with the grid non‐orthogonality effectively in solving the flow in complex geometries, especially at high Reynolds numbers. In this study, the newly proposed Coupled and Linked Equations Algorithm Revised‐ER (CLEARER) algorithm is adopted to solve this problem successfully. In CLEARER algorithm the second relaxation factor is introduced in constructing the contravariant interface velocities, by setting it to a low value. CLEARER algorithm can overcome the severe grid non‐orthogonality and non‐linearity of equations effectively. After the numerical results with CLEARER are validated with the benchmark solutions, this algorithm is used to solve the lid‐driven flow in inclined cavity with inclination angles varying from 10 to 170^°, and Reynolds numbers varying from 5000 to 15 000. The streamlines and the centerline velocity distributions are provided in detail for all cases, which may offer some guidance for the study in this area. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Initial guess by improved population-based intelligent algorithms for large inter-frame deformation measurement using digital image correlation

Digital image correlation (DIC) has received a widespread research and application in experimental mechanics. In DIC, the performance of subpixel registration algorithm (e.g., Newton-Raphson method, quasi-Newton method) relies heavily on the initial guess of deformation. In the case of small inter-frame deformation, the initial guess could be found by simple search scheme, the coarse-fine search for instance. While for large inter-frame deformation, it is difficult for simple search scheme to robustly estimate displacement parameters and deformation parameters simultaneously with low computational cost. In this paper, we proposed three improving strategies, i.e. Q-stage evolutionary strategy (T), parameter control strategy (C) and space expanding strategy (E), and then combined them into three population-based intelligent algorithms (PIAs), i.e. genetic algorithm (GA), differential evolution (DE) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), and finally derived eighteen different algorithms to calculate the initial guess for qN. The eighteen algorithms were compared in three sets of experiments including large rigid body translation, finite uniaxial strain and large rigid body rotation, and the results showed the effectiveness of proposed improving strategies. Among all compared algorithms, DE-TCE is the best which is robust, convenient and efficient for large inter-frame deformation measurement.     

Processing optimization: A way to improve the ionic conductivity and dielectric loss of electroactive polymers

Electro‐active polymers (EAPs) such as P(VDF‐TrFE‐CTFE) are greatly promising in the field of flexible sensors and actuators, but their low dielectric strength driven by ionic conductivity is a main concern for achieving high electrostrictive performance. It is well known that there is a quadratic dependence of the strain response and mechanical energy density on the applied electric field. This dependence highlights the importance of improving the electrical breakdown EAPs while reducing the dielectric losses. This article demonstrates that it is possible to dramatically increase the electrical breakdown and decrease the dielectric losses by controlling processing parameters of the polymer synthesis and fabrication procedure. As a result, an enhancement of around 70% is achieved in both the strain and blocking force. The effects on the dielectric losses of the polymer crystallinity, molecular weight, solvent purity, and crystallization temperature are also investigated. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part B: Polym. Phys. 2018 , 56, 1164–1173     

Nonlinear programming without a penalty function or a filter

A new method is introduced for solving equality constrained nonlinear optimization problems. This method does not use a penalty function, nor a filter, and yet can be proved to be globally convergent to first-order stationary points. It uses different trust-regions to cope with the nonlinearities of the objective function and the constraints, and allows inexact SQP steps that do not lie exactly in the nullspace of the local Jacobian. Preliminary numerical experiments on CUTEr problems indicate that the method performs well.      

Schemata, Distributions and Graphical Models in Evolutionary Optimization

In this paper the optimization of additively decomposed discrete functions is investigated. For these functions genetic algorithms have exhibited a poor performance. First the schema theory of genetic algorithms is reformulated in probability theory terms. A schema defines the structure of a marginal distribution. Then the conceptual algorithm BEDA is introduced. BEDA uses a Boltzmann distribution to generate search points. From BEDA a new algorithm, FDA, is derived. FDA uses a factorization of the distribution. The factorization captures the structure of the given function. The factorization problem is closely connected to the theory of conditional independence graphs. For the test functions considered, the performance of FDA—in number of generations till convergence—is similar to that of a genetic algorithm for the OneMax function. This result is theoretically explained.     

Simulated annealing and genetic algorithms for minimizing mean flow time in an open shop

This paper considers the problem of scheduling n jobs on m machines in an open shop environment so that the sum of completion times or mean flow time becomes minimal. It continues recent work by Bräsel et al. [H. Bräsel, A. Herms, M. Mörig, T. Tautenhahn, T. Tusch, F. Werner, Heuristic constructive algorithms for open shop scheduling to minmize mean flow time, European J. Oper. Res., in press (doi.10.1016/j.ejor.2007.02.057)] on constructive algorithms. For this strongly NP-hard problem, we present two iterative algorithms, namely a simulated annealing and a genetic algorithm. For the simulated annealing algorithm, several neighborhoods are suggested and tested together with the control parameters of the algorithm. For the genetic algorithm, new genetic operators are suggested based on the representation of a solution by the rank matrix describing the job and machine orders. Extensive computational results are presented for problems with up to 50 jobs and 50 machines, respectively. The algorithms are compared relative to each other, and the quality of the results is also estimated partially by a lower bound for the corresponding preemptive open shop problem. For most of the problems, the genetic algorithm is superior when fixing the same number of 30 000 generated solutions for each algorithm. However, in contrast to makespan minimization problems, where the focus is on problems with an equal number of jobs and machines, it turns out that problems with a larger number of jobs than machines are the hardest problems.     

Optimal portfolios: new variations of an old theme

We survey some recent developments in the area of continuous-time portfolio optimization. These will include the use of options and of defaultable assets as investment classes and the presentation of a worst-case investment approach that takes the possibility of stock market crashes into account.      

SUPER EFFICIENCY AND ITS SCALARIZATION IN TOPOLOGICAL VECTOR SPACE

1. Introduction and PreliminariesRecently, Borwein and Zhuang[1,21 introduced the concept of super efficiency in normedlinear space. Super efficiency refines the notion of efficiency and other kinds of properefficiency; they provided concise scalar characterizations and duality results when the underlying decision problem is convex. They also established a Lagrange Multiplier Theoremfor super efficiency in convex settings and expressed super efficient points as saddle pointsof appropriate L…