Month: March 2019

A Self-Organizing Grouping Approach for Ship Traffic Scheduling in Restricted One-Way Waterway

Ship scheduling optimization is one of the most effective ways to eliminate the bottlenecks of waterway transportation, especially in restricted one-way waterways. In this study, a novel scheduling model called self-organizing grouping is proposed to minimize two types of delay time, which are the waiting time and the extra navigation time caused by speed reduction. The proposed model schedules ships in an iterative way based on the distributed scheduling mode. To alleviate the impact of local scheduling on the overall traffic efficiency, a grouping method is proposed, in which the ships are divided into different groups based on their arrival time interval. Moreover, the ships in the same group are scheduled to minimize the interferences among them by incorporating a grouping improvement strategy. The strategy is used to deal with the influence of ships with very small speed. Experiments are carried out by comparing the proposed model with the first-come-first-serve model and the ship self-organizing cooperation model. Simulation results show that the delay time is reduced by 25%‐30% and approximately by 5% compared with that from the two models, respectively. Such advantage also exists for different combinations of ship traffic parameters. In addition, long-distance sailing with limited speed can be avoided using the proposed method, which is beneficial to relieve waterway traffic congestion.

 

A Self-Organizing Grouping Approach for Ship Traffic Scheduling in Restricted One-Way Waterway
Authors: Xin, Xuri; Liu, Kezhong; Zhang, Jinfen; Chen, Shuzhe; Wang, Hongbo; Cheng, Zhiyou
Source: Marine Technology Society Journal, Volume 53, Number 1, January/February 2019, pp. 83-96(14)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4031/MTSJ.53.1.9

Source: www.ingentaconnect.com

Emergence: How Complex Wholes Emerge From Simple Parts

Throughout nature, throngs of relatively simple elements can self-organize into behaviors that seem unexpectedly complex. Scientists are beginning to understand why and how these phenomena emerge without a central organizing entity.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org

The Human Generosity Project

The Human Generosity Project is the first large-scale transdisciplinary research project to investigate the interrelationship between biological and cultural influences on human generosity. We use multiple methodologies to understand the nature and evolution of human generosity including fieldwork, laboratory experiments and computational modeling.

Source: www.humangenerosity.org

Neurosexism: the myth that men and women have different brains

[…] as The Gendered Brain reveals, conclusive findings about sex-linked brain differences have failed to materialize. Beyond the “missing five ounces” of female brain — gloated about since the nineteenth century — modern neuroscientists have identified no decisive, category-defining differences between the brains of men and women. In women’s brains, language-processing is not spread any more evenly across the hemispheres than it is in men’s, as a small 1995 Nature study proclaimed but a large 2008 meta-analysis disproved (B. A. Shaywitz et al. Nature 373, 607–609 (1995) and I. E. Sommer et al. Brain Res. 1206, 76–88; 2008). Brain size increases with body size, and certain features, such as the ratio of grey to white matter or the cross-sectional area of a nerve tract called the corpus callosum, scale slightly non-linearly with brain size. But these are differences in degree, not kind. As Rippon notes, they are also seen when we compare small-headed men to large-headed women, and have no relationship to differences in hobbies or take-home pay.

 

The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters The Myth Of The Female Brain. Gina Rippon The Bodley Head (2019)

Source: www.nature.com

A Multilayer Structure Facilitates the Production of Antifragile Systems in Boolean Network Models

Antifragility is a property to not only resist stress and but also to benefit from it. Even though antifragile dynamics are found in various real-world complex systems where multiple subsystems interact with each other, the attribute has not been quantitatively explored yet in those complex systems which can be regarded as multilayer networks. Here we study how the multilayer structure affects the antifragility of the whole system. By comparing single-layer and multilayer Boolean networks based on our recently proposed antifragility measure, we found that the multilayer structure facilitated the production of antifragile systems. Our measure and findings can be utilized for many applications from understanding properties of biological systems with multilayer structures to designing more antifragile engineered systems.

 

A Multilayer Structure Facilitates the Production of Antifragile Systems in Boolean Network Models
Hyobin Kim, Omar K. Pineda, Carlos Gershenson

Source: arxiv.org