This paper argues that powerful impetus exists for the realisation of a global multilateral electronic market infrastructure, as envisaged by the ebXML endeavour. Crucial in this regard is the problem of interoperability: making it possible for disparate systems to interact fluently. An obvious panacea would be to use a pre-specified set of protocols comprised of selected globally-accessible op...

This report addresses uncertainties pertaining to brachytherapy single-source dosimetry preceding clinical use. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Technical Note 1297 are taken as reference standards for uncertainty formalism. Uncertainties in using det...

We study long run average behavior of generalized semi-Markov processes with both fixed-delay events as well as variable-delay events. We show that allowing two fixed-delay events and one variable-delay event may cause an unstable behavior of a GSMP. In particular, we show that a frequency of a given state may not be defined for almost all runs (or more generally, an invariant measure may not e...

The Open University's repository of research publications and other research outputs The role of standards in global value chains and their impact on economic and social upgrading Other How to cite: Kaplinsky, Raphael (2010). The role of standards in global value chains and their impact on economic and social upgrading. World Bank.

—This paper presents a new stable robust adaptive controller and observer design for a class of nonlinear systems that contain i. Coupling of unmeasured states and unknown parameters ii. Unknown dead zone at the system actuator. The system is firstly cast into a modified form in which the observer and parameter estimation become feasible. Then a stable robust adaptive controller, state observer...

We consider Markovian GSMPs (generalized semi-Markov processes) in which the rates of events are subject to control. A control is monotone if the rate of one event is increasing or decreasing in the number of occurrences of other events. We give general conditions for the existence of monotone optimal controls. The conditions are functional properties for the one-step cost functions and, more i...

Development aid forms an important link between rich countries, poor countries and poor people. But there have been serious concerns raised by aid critiques about the quality and accuracy of the global aid data (Riddell 2007, Easterly and Pfutze 2008 and Birdsall et al, 2010). It is often incomplete and of poor quality. Though OECD DAC has long played a key role in defining and capturing data o...