We address the problem of planning outages of nuclear power plants submitted by EDF (Électricité De France) as the challenge EURO/ROADEF 2010. As our team won the first prize of the contest in the senior category, our approach may be of interest: it is conceptually simple, easy to program and computationally relatively fast. We present both our method and some ideas to improve it.

We demonstrate for the first time a multi-wavelength laser based on a bismuth-based erbium-doped fiber (Bi-EDF) assisted by a four-wave mixing (FWM) process. Using a simple linear cavity resonator scheme containing a 49 cm long highly nonlinear Bi-EDF, we obtained about 8 lines of optical comb with a line spacing of approximately 0.52 nm at the maximum 1480 nm pump power of 160mW.

The output from simulation factorial experiments can be complex and may not be amenable to standard methods of estimation like ANOVA. We consider the situation where the simulation output may not satisfy normality assumptions, but more importantly, where there may be differences in output at different factor combinations, but these are not simply differences in means. We show that EDF statistic...

Hierarchical scheduling provides a means of composing multiple real-time applications onto a single processor such that the temporal requirements of each application are met. This has become a popular technique in industry as it allows applications from multiple vendors as well as legacy applications to co-exist in isolation on the same platform. However, performance enhancing features such as ...

Datacenters are the main infrastructure on top of which cloud computing services are offered. Such infrastructure may be shared by a large number of tenants and applications generating a spectrum of datacenter traffic. Delay sensitive applications and applications with specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs), generate deadline constrained flows, while other applications initiate flows that are...

Schedulability tests are presented for preemptive earliest-deadlinerst and deadline-monotonic scheduling of periodic real-time tasks on a singlequeue m-server system, in which the deadline of a task may be less than or equal to the task period. These results subsume and generalize several known utilization-based multiprocessor schedulability tests, and are derived via an independent proof.

Schedulability tests are presented for preemptive earliest-deadline-first and deadline-monotonic scheduling of periodic or sporadic real-time tasks on a singlequeue -server system, in which the deadline of a task may be less than or equal to the task period. These results subsume and generalize several known utilization-based multiprocessor schedulability tests, and are derived via an independe...

The increasing popularity of multi-core architectures is pushing researchers and developers to consider multi-cores for executing soft and hard real-time applications. Real-Time schedulers for multi processor systems can be roughly categorized into partitioned and global schedulers. The first ones are more adequate for hard real-time embedded systems, in which applications are statically loaded...

We study scheduling of multimedia traffic on the downlink of a wireless communication system. We examine a scenario where multimedia packets are associated with strict deadlines and are equivalent to lost packets if they arrive after their associated deadlines. Lost packets result in degradation of playout quality at the receiver, which is quantified in terms of the “distortion cost” associated...