In this article, we analyze the application of options contract in the special commodity supply chain such as fresh agricultural products. This problem is discussed from the point of the retailer. When spot market and future market are both available, we discuss how the retailer chooses the optimal production. Furthermore, overconfidence is introduced to the supply chain of the fresh agricultur...

Lamport’s Happened-before relation is fundamental to coordinating actions in asynchronous systems. Its role is less dominant in synchronous systems, in which bounds are available on transmission times over channels. This paper initiates a study of the role that time bounds play in synchronous systems by focusing on two classes of problems: Ordered Response, in which a triggering event must be f...

INTRODUCTION The chemical industry is a much safer place to work than many industries with fewer inherent hazards. Nevertheless, almost all the accidents that have occurred need not have occurred. Most of them have happened before and have been described in published reports. Someone knew how to prevent them even if the people on the job at the time did not. There is something seriously wrong w...

Outlier detection is concerned with discovering exceptional behaviors of objects. Its theoretical principle and practical implementation lay a foundation for some important applications such as credit card fraud detection, discovering criminal behaviors in e-commerce, discovering computer intrusion, etc. In this paper, we first present a unified model for several existing outlier detection sche...

The problem of discovering a strategy for playing a game can be viewed as requiring discovery of a computer program. This paper describes the recently developed "genetic programming" paradigm which genetically breeds populations of hierarchical computer programs to solve problems. The computer programs are evolved using the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest and the genetic operatio...