Non-numeric Information Research Articles

Energy system assessment with sustainability indicators

The paper presents an attempt to select, define and apply a set of sustainability indicators for the energy system assessment. Starting from the general sustainability concept, a set of indicators is defined reflecting specific criteria for the energy system evaluation. Particular attention is devoted to the resource, environment, social and economic criteria. Among these groups of criteria there are individual indicators emphasising respective aspect of the sustainability concept. This approach has its limitation due to the lack of data for serious consideration of the system. But it should be anticipated that these excises might serve as the guidance for the eventual future application. Also, this methodology for the assessment of energy system will become an useful tool only if it proves useful in the engineering practice. The example under consideration is an island with only individual consumption to be satisfied with solar, wind, biomass and oil-fired power plant which represent four options under consideration. The set of indicators is defined and determined with the aim to demonstrate the method of decision making procedure in selecting the option which meet selected indicators numerical values and constrain reflecting the non-numeric information of weighting factor for the determination of general criteria for the selection of appropriate option.

HYBRID SEARCH STRATEGIES FOR HETEROGENEOUS SEARCH SPACES

Recently, there has been much interest in enhancing purely combinatorial formalisms with numerical information. For example, planning formalisms can be enriched by taking resource constraints and probabilistic information into account. The Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) paradigm from operations research provides a natural tool for solving optimization problems that combine such numeric and non-numeric information. The MIP approach relies heavily on linear program relaxations and branch-and-bound search. This is in contrast with depth-first or iterative deepening strategies generally used in artificial intelligence. We provide a detailed characterization of the structure of the underlying search spaces as explored by these search strategies. Our analysis shows that much can be gained by combining different search strategies for solving hard MIP problems, thereby leveraging each strategy's strength in terms of the combinatorial and numeric information.

Visualization's new tack: making sense of information

People constantly deal with nonnumeric information that has no correspondence to actual physical space. The authors describe how vast abstract hierarchies, networks, and relationships within text-including the World Wide Web itself-demand a new way of designing visualization tools.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Incorporating non-numeric and subjective information in investment decision models for farmers

Microcomputer-based business and financial decision aids have become important tools for farmers in the changing global economy. Unfortunately, many sophisticated software packages are either too expensive for widespread use or too limited to be realistic. This paper proposes linking multiple software programs to create comprehensive yet inexpensive computerized decision aids that help the farmer clarify information needs, sort and manipulate data, and specify subjective differences among alternatives. Three software packages that combine numeric and subjective information are linked in a pre-retirement investment planning example. The demonstration shows an investment strategy that is rejected by empirical optimization software to be the best strategy using the linked software approach. The process ensures a more realistic result and a better documented decision than is commonly available. The methodology is attainable by many computer-literate readers and applicable to a broad spectrum of farm management problems.

DAPS: Expert System for Structural Damage Assessment

Assessment of structural damage is a complex subject imbued with uncertainty and vagueness. This complexity arises from the use of subjective opinion and imprecise numerical data. An analysis of the structural integrity of a buried concrete box structure is accomplished using combined nonnumeric and numeric information. Expert opinions on structural damage are used to develop the nonnumeric portion of the code. Fuzzy sets are used to quantify linguistic variables since this type of information is inherently vague and imprecise. Because of the size and the complexity of the problem, a numerical method in the form of a fuzzy weighted‐average algorithm is used instead of rules to synthesize the nonnumeric information. The damage assessment paradigm is subdivided into smaller problems, which in turn are represented in antecedent‐consequent pairs as rules. These rules and numerical data form the knowledge base. The processing of this information is controlled through an expert system shell, which retrieves necessary facts from the user and the knowledge base using an appropriate search strategy. Numeric data are manipulated in the expert system through calls to external subroutines and data bases. This information is then interpreted through the use of production rules.

An expert decision-support system for option-based investment strategies

OTAS is an experimental decision-support system for options trading written in the constraint logic programming language CLP (R) . The management of option-based investment strategies is based on a mixture of complex mathematical models and heuristics and requires both extensive processing of numeric and non-numeric information. Furthermore, fluctuating market conditions and changing investor's profiles which are also key factors in building successful strategies need to be dynamically integrated with other non-volatile information. In this paper, we show how these problems are addressed using the expressive and computational power of constraints in the CLP framework, resulting, in OTAS, in a level of flexibility not found in existing options analysis systems.

THE EFFECT OF PRESENTATION FORM ON JUDGMENT CONFIDENCE IN PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to determine if a numeric presentation form is associated with high decision confidence and recognition of information consistency. Financial analysts were provided with a description of companies engaged in research and development or production within the chemical industry; financial statements for each company; and comments made by each company's president. These comments contained either numeric or nonnumeric information about the company, and also a statement by the president regarding his satisfaction with that particular year's financial performance. Subjects were requested to evaluate how well each company had performed financially, and were asked to express the confidence they had in the correctness of each of their evaluations. Statistical results show that higher decision confidence is associated with nonnumeric information but that numeric information makes the recognition of information (in) consistency easier.

A generalized scientific information system

Information which is used for computation by any investigator in a quantitative branch of science may be broadly classified as numerical and nonnumeric. In handbook, numeric information is typically given in the form of tables or graphs. Nonnumeric information corresponds to the physical laws that hold in that branch of science. The physical laws are given in the form of functions or expressions. The user selects, from the handbook, information appropriate to the problem and manipulates the information using suitable tools (e.g. numeric, algebraic, heuristic). The scientific Information System (SIS) is a terminal oriented system that allows users facilities to retrieve information in the form of data of formulae and manipulate it. In this way, SIS gives the facility of using a handbook and also permits the user to solve problems using numeric and symbolic manipulation techniques.

The Effect of Presentation Form on the Use of Information in Annual Reports

Information for management decisions is typically presented in both numeric and nonnumeric forms. This paper tests whether the choice of presentation form affects the use of such information by decision makers. Selected information from corporate annual reports was provided to a group of practicing financial analysts in a quasi-experimental setting. The analysts were asked to evaluate two companies (one R&amp;D company and one manufacturing company) using selected financial data and excerpts from the president’s letter. Some versions of the letter contained numeric information while other versions contained nonnumeric information. The study tested several hypotheses which specified the conditions under which information in one presentation form would receive higher weight in a decision than the other form. Relative weights placed on different information forms were determined by an averaging model from information integration theory. The appendix contains a presentation of that model. The study’s results suggest that when the link between organizational actions and future performance is not well established and understood, financial analysts may give more weight to nonnumeric information in evaluating a company. This study has important implications because it shows that in certain situations managers can influence financial analysts’ use of information by varying presentation form.

The architecture of CASSM

This paper presents the architecture of a context-addressed cellular system for non-numeric information processing, using an inexpensive, large-capacity circulating memory device. The system allows data to be represented in a structure very close to the form as the user perceives it (information structure) and allows the search operations of high level queries to be implemented directly. The information structures currently used in existing information systems are described. Then the architecture of the system as a whole is presented, as well as the implementation of these information structures as basic data types and hardware management of storage allocation and garbage collection. The paper intends to demonstrate that distributing intelligence throughout a rotating memory device can decrease the time required for search operations in large data bases. And that the search strategy and storage management functions can be efficiently carried out in hardware, greatly simplifying the software of information systems. Thus, data not only becomes faster but easier to access, verify, insert and delete.

A code for non-numeric information processing applications in online systems

A code has been specifically designed to simplify the internal information processing operations within an online computer system with respect to non-numeric applications, and to maximize the transfer rate of the information channel linking the system and the system user. The code has direct application to problems in areas such as information retrieval, document classification, computer-aided teaching and text editing. This code, called IPC (Information Processing Code), is an 8-bit code set constructed so that 7, 6, 5 and 4-bit subsets can be easily derived from the basic set. The code set is organized so that simple binary operations can distinguish between the numeric alphabetic, special symbol and control character codes. The number of useable characters within the basic set size may be expanded either by use of escape codes included in the set, or by suitable interpretation of otherwise unassigned codes on the basis of the requirements of local environments.