The notion of class is widely used in systems analysis and data modeling methodologies and is fundatnental to emergitig object-oriented approaches. However, there are no theory-based guidelines for evaluating the quality of a collection of classes selected to model an application. In this paper, we assume that the class is used as a modeling construct in an effort to follow more closely the way...

A continuous simulation approach is proposed for estimating water temperature exceedance probabilities using thermo-hydrodynamic modeling. The approach uses (1) a deterministic unsteady ow and heat transport model, (2) continuous hydrological and meteorological data for a long historical period, and (3) synthetic records of tributary water temperatures and other model inputs. Representative his...

Reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) is one of the waste materials that highway agencies promote to use in new construction or rehabilitation of highways pavement. Since the use of RAP can affect the resilient modulus and other structural properties of flexible pavement layers, this paper aims to employ two different artificial neural network (ANN) models for modeling and evaluating the effects of ...

In this paper, we investigate whether the theoretical default probability measures calculated from Merton’s (1974) structural credit risk model can provide a better way to explain and predict credit rating than traditional statistical models. The empirical results suggest that Merton’s theoretical default measure is not a sufficient statistic of equity market information concerning credit quali...

Current research is probing transport on ever smaller scales. Modeling of the electromagnetic interaction with nanoparticles or small collections of dipoles and its associated energy transport and nonequilibrium characteristics requires a detailed understanding of transport properties. The goal of this paper is to use a nonequilibrium statistical-mechanical method to obtain exact time-correlati...

Do negative absolute temperatures matter physics and specifically Statistical Physics? We provide evidence that we can certainly answer positively to this vexata quaestio. The great majority of models investigated by statistical mechanics over almost one century a half exhibit positive temperature, because their entropy is nondecreasing function energy. Since more than ago it has been realized ...

The performance of surface damping treatments may vary once the surface is exposed to a wide range of temperatures, because the performance of viscoelastic damping material is highly dependent on operational temperature. In addition, experimental data for dynamic responses of viscoelastic material are inherently random, which makes it difficult to design a robust damping layout. In this paper a...