Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with continuous arterial spin labeling (CASL) was employed to monitor brain activation during narrative production of a semi-structured speech sample in healthy young adults. Subjects were asked to describe a wordless children's picture story. Significant activations were found in bilateral prefrontal and left temporal-parietal regions during narrati...

The specification language Csp-Casl allows one to model data as well as processes of distributed systems within one framework. In our paper, we describe how a combination of the existing tools HETS and Csp-Prover can solve the challenges that Csp-Casl raises on integrated theorem proving for processes and data. For building this new tool, the automated generation of theorems and their proofs in...

We aim at using algebraic techniques, and in particular an extension, Casl-Ltl of the Casl basic language in order to produce a formal semantics of the UML. Contrary to most cases, this task is far from trivial. Indeed, the UML notation is complex, including a lot of heterogeneous notations for diierent aspects of a system, possibly described in diierent phases of the development process. Moreo...

We propose an augmented Lagrangian algorithm for solving large-scale equality constrained optimization problems. The novel feature of the algorithm is an adaptive update for the penalty parameter motivated by recently proposed techniques for exact penalty methods. This adaptive updating scheme greatly improves the overall performance of the algorithm without sacrificing the strengths of the cor...

An improved Lagrangian relaxation (LR) solution to the thermal unit commitment problem (UCP) is proposed in this paper. The algorithm is characterized by: (1) a new Matlab function to determine the optimal path of the dual problem, (2) new initialization procedure of Lagrangian multipliers, based on both unit and time interval classification, (3) a flexible adjustment of Lagrangian multipliers,...

This chapter describes an agent-oriented requirements engineering approach that combines informal i* models with formal specifications in the multiagent system specification formalisms ConGolog and its extension CASL. This allows the requirements engineer to exploit the complementary features of the frameworks. i* can be used to model social dependencies between agents and how process design ch...

A finite-volume dynamical core with a terrain-following Lagrangian control-volume discretization is described. The vertically Lagrangian discretization reduces the dimensionality of the physical problem from three to two with the resulting dynamical system closely resembling that of the shallow water system. The 2D horizontalto-Lagrangian-surface transport and dynamical processes are then discr...

In this paper, a step fixed charge transportation problem is developed where the products are sent from the sources to the destinations in existence of both unit and step fixed-charges. The proposed model determines the amount of products in the existing routes with the aim of minimizing the total cost (sum of unit and step fixed-charges) to satisfy the demand of each customer. As the problem i...

In constrained optimisation, the augmented Lagrangian method is considered as one of the most effective and efficient methods. This paper studies the behaviour of augmented Lagrangian function (ALF) in the solution space and then proposes an improved augmented Lagrangian method. We have shown that our proposed method can overcome some of the drawbacks of the conventional augmented Lagrangian me...