E-businesses play a critical role in today's knowledge-based economies. Despite their ‎increasing portion, e-businesses experience high rates of failure. Therefore, it is of prime ‎importance to identify their decision-making activities encountering outer competitive forces ‎and their internal structural events. In this study, through using the Grounded Theory approach, we ‎analyze interviews c...

Aggregation operators (AOs) have been studied by many schol- ars. As many AOs are proposed, there is still lacking approach to classify the categories of AO, and to select the appropriate AO within the AO candidates. In this research, each AO can be regarded as a cognitive style or individual dierence. A Cognitive Style and Aggregation Operator (CSAO) model is pro- posed to analyze the mapping ...

Clustering agents by their behaviour can be crucial for building effective agent models. Traditional clustering typically aims to group entities together based on a distance metric, where a desirable clustering is one where the entities in a cluster are spatially close together. Instead, one may desire to cluster based on actionability, or the capacity for the clusters to suggest how an agent s...

This paper describes a sequel of the previous experiments on real number genetic algorithm behavior [2], [3]. A particular example of multicriteria optimization is discussed. The behavior of the two previously explored genetic algorithms is compared with a simple evolutionary algorithm. The main idea of the experiments is to stimulate the algorithm to find the Pareto set without measuring domin...

Stochasticity pervades life at the cellular level. Cells receive stochastic signals, perform detection and transduction with stochastic biochemistry, and grow and die in stochastic environments. Here we review progress in going from the molecular details to the information-processing strategies cells use in their decision-making. Such strategies are fundamentally influenced by stochasticity. We...

Implementing efficient algorithms for combining decision procedures has been a challenge and their correctness precarious. In this paper we describe an inference system that has the classical Nelson-Oppen procedure at its core and includes several optimizations: variable abstraction with sharing, canonization of terms at the theory level, and Shostak’s streamlined generation of new equalities f...

One of the major goals of the Sustainable Agriculture Farming initiatives at UC Davis is to provide information about the feasibility of adopting conservation tillage and cover cropping at the farm level. The project includes two tillage schemes: standard tillage (ST) and conservation tillage (CT), and three farming methods: conventional, organic, and winter legume cover crop. All three product...

Global biodiversity continues along a trajectory of decline despite enormous conservation efforts (Rands et al., 2010). This is also true in China, one of the most biodiversity-rich countries in the world (Liu and Raven, 2010; Ministry of Environmental Protection of China, 2010a). To fundamentally change this trajectory, it is essential to understand complex interactions among various forces af...