thermoplastic starch (tps) materials present several advantages to the plastic industry andwhen blended with other materials they can exhibit improved mechanical and moisturesensitivity properties compared to pure tps materials. further investigations on tps: pvablends are of particular interest due to their excellent compatibility and improved properties suchas tensile strength, elongation, to...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is conducting a research program to investigate the crash compatibility of passenger cars, light trucks and vans (LTV’s) in vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. NHTSA has conducted a series of eight full-scale vehicle-to-vehicle crash tests to evaluate vehicle compatibility issues. Tests were conducted using four bullet vehicles representing ...

A model of P systems with symport / antiport rules is given in terms of hypernets, a generalization of a class of hierarchical Petri nets introduced for modeling mobility inside the nets-within-nets paradigm. The hierarchical structure of a P system is reflected by the associated hypernet, where molecules are modeled by unstructured agents (simple tokens) and membranes by agents. Each agent is ...

Service-oriented computing provides a suitable technological foundation for developing and executing dynamic business processes. However, most current approaches for composition languages and architectures for dynamic process integration do not provide the flexibility and dynamism required by interorganisational evolving environments. In this work, the DENEB platform for the development and exe...

Nested Petri nets (NP-nets) is an extension of the Petri nets formalism within the nets-within-nets approach, allowing to model systems of interacting dynamic agents in a natural way. One of the main problems in verifying of such systems is the State Explosion Problem. To tackle this problem for highly concurrent systems the unfolding method has proved to be very helpful. In this paper we conti...

Recent work has defined an optimal reward problem (ORP) in which an agent designer, with an objective reward function that evaluates an agent’s behavior, has a choice of what reward function to build into a learning or planning agent to guide its behavior. Existing results on ORP show weak mitigation of limited computational resources, i.e., the existence of reward functions so that agents when...

In recent years research on automatic imitation has received considerable attention because it represents an experimental platform for investigating a number of interrelated theories suggesting that the perception of action automatically activates corresponding motor programs. A key debate within this research centers on whether automatic imitation is any different than other long-term S-R asso...