the computation of structural failure probability is vital importance in the reliability analysis and may be carried out on the basis of the first-order reliability method using various mathematical iterative approaches such as hasofer-lind and rackwitz-fiessler (hl-rf). this method may not converge in complicated problems and nonlinear limit state functions, which usually shows itself in the f...

detention rockfill dams are an easy and common tool for flood control. due to their coarse pores, the flow in void spaces is turbulent and non-darcy. different relationships introduced by researchers are used to define the hydraulics of the flow within the rockfill materials. the present research is aimed at gaining a better understanding of the differ-ence among these relationships and the sou...

This study explores buyers’ search and purchase behavior in an information-overloaded retail Electronic Marketplace (EMP). Two instrumental variables, i.e. number of visitors and number of sales for an item, are used to represent buyers’ search and purchase behavior. Price and reputation, two of the most frequently researched independent variables in EMP studies, are considered. The relationshi...

This paper discusses the descriptional complexity of generalized forbidding grammars in context of degrees, numbers of nonterminals and conditional productions, and a new descriptional complexity measure—an index—of generalized forbidding grammars.

In recent years, several systems have been proposed that learn the rules of a simple card or board game solely from visual demonstration. These systems were constructed for specific games and rely on substantial background knowledge. We introduce a general system for learning board game rules from videos and demonstrate it on several well-known games. The presented algorithm requires only a few...

in this paper the fuzzy structural reliability index was determined through modeling epistemic uncertainty arising from ambiguity in statistical parameters of random variables. the first order reliability method (form) has been used and a robust genetic algorithm in the alpha level optimization method has been proposed for the determination of the fuzzy reliability index. the sensitivity level ...

We investigate the descriptional complexity of limited propagating Lindenmayer systems and their deterministic and tabled variants with respect to the number of rules and the number of symbols. We determine the decrease of complexity when the generative capacity is increased. For incomparable families, we give languages that can be described more efficiently in either of these families than in ...

The height of a piecewise-testable language L is the maximum length of the words needed to define L by excluding and requiring given subwords. The height of L is an important descriptive complexity measure that has not yet been investigated in a systematic way. This paper develops a series of new techniques for bounding the height of finite languages and of languages obtained by taking closures...