This paper is motivated by a study of the mechanism used to assign primary school students in Singapore to secondary schools. The assignment process requires that primary school students submit a rank ordered list of six schools to the Ministry of Education. Students are then assigned to secondary schools based on their preferences, with priority going to those with the highest examination scor...

This paper describes the robust optimal incremental motion control of a current  sensorless synchronous reluctance motor (SynRM), which can be specified by any desired speed profile. The control scheme is a combination of conventional linear quadratic (LQ) feedback control method and sliding mode control (SMC). A novel sliding switching surface is employed first, that makes the states of the Sy...

Three waveforms for transthoracic defibrillation are assessed and compared: the Pulsed Biphasic Waveform (PBW), the Rectilinear Biphasic Waveform (RBW), and the “lossless” constant current (LLCC) pulses. Two indices are introduced: 1) kf = W/W0 – the ratio between the delivered energy W and the energy W0 of a rectangular pulse with the same duration and electric charge; 2) ηC = W/WC0 – the leve...

Shape is one of the most important property that is perceived about objects. It allows predicting more facts about an object when compared with other features. Thus recognizing shape is crucial for object recognition. This paper proposes an optimal morphological shape decomposition scheme that represents the object accurately and efficiently. The high level of redundancy in representation is th...

Roots provide plants with mechanical stability and pure water. Wind and gravitational forces on plants are spread out by the roots over a large volume of soil. In a similar manner, roots absorb pure water and nutrients from moist soil. These processes are mathematically similar and have similar optimal solutions, unless the soil is inhomogeneous -i.e. if one part is wetter, whereas another part...