Processing Resource Requirements Research Articles

Resource Intensity Trends in the South African Ferrochrome Industry from 2007 to 2020

Processing resource requirements in mineral extractive industries tend to increase over time as ore grades decrease, which consequently increases the environmental footprint of operations and products. This phenomenon may be alleviated by cleaner production interventions. South Africa is the largest global supplier of chromium. This study investigates the impact of cleaner production process improvements on selected resource intensities of the South African ferrochrome industry. Sustainability data, available since the start of regular sustainability reporting in 2007, were used to compile resource intensity trends. This was followed by a review of industry capital projects relating to resource-use optimisation, interrogated in interviews with industry experts, to ascertain their effect on resource intensities. The emergence of a symbiotic relationship with the platinum-group metals industry was identified as a major development, with chromite ore intensity decreasing from 2.54 to 1.98 kg per kg ferrochrome. Electrical energy intensity was observed to decrease from 3.47 to 2.86 kWh per ton ferrochrome, mainly as a result of cleaner smelting technology, though cogeneration fired by furnace off-gases also contributed significantly. The introduction of cleaner production interventions in the South African ferrochrome industry was thus documented to have resulted in decreased resource use intensities.

A Robust Prevention Method for Automated Manufacturing Systems With Unreliable Resources Using Petri Nets

On the basis of the assumption that no resource failure occurs, a variety of deadlock control policies have been developed for automated manufacturing systems (AMSs). However, in practical manufacturing systems, the occurrence of resource failures is always inescapable. In case, if resources fail to work, the existing deadlock control strategies can no longer be applied to the changed system; therefore, redesigning a new strategy is necessary. Because of their powerful modeling capabilities, Petri nets are used to model the considered AMSs allowing multi-type and multi-quantity resource acquisition. This paper focuses on extending a deadlock prevention method to be applied to AMSs with unreliable resources. Strict minimal siphons are controlled by added control places (monitors) to ensure the system’s liveness. To prevent blocking issues caused by resource failures, we develop a set of shared resource constraints represented by a set of inequalities based on the minimal resource requirements of processes and the capacity of shared resources. Robust monitors are designed for them to limit the distribution of tokens in unreliable neighborhood places. Our objective is to control resource allocation such that those parts not necessarily requiring any failed resource can continue progressing smoothly even if some unreliable resources break down. Examples are given to elucidate our proposed method clearly.

Real-time video content analysis

Real-Time content-based access to live video data requires content analysis applications that are able to process video streams in real-time and with an acceptable error rate. Statements such as this express quality of service (QoS) requirements. In general, control of the QoS provided can be achieved by sacrificing application quality in one QoS dimension for better quality in another, or by controlling the allocation of processing resources to the application. However, controlling QoS in video content analysis is particularly difficult, not only because main QoS dimensions like accuracy are nonadditive, but also because both the communication- and the processing-resource requirements are challenging.This article presents techniques for QoS-aware composition of applications for real-time video content analysis, based on dynamic Bayesian networks. The aim of QoS-aware composition is to determine application deployment configurations which satisfy a given set of QoS requirements. Our approach consists of: (1) an algorithm for QoS-aware selection of configurations of feature extractor and classification algorithms which balances requirements for timeliness and accuracy against available processing resources, (2) a distributed content-based publish/subscribe system which provides application scalability at multiple logical levels of distribution, and (3) scalable solutions for video streaming, filtering/transformation, feature extraction, and classification.We evaluate our approach based on experiments with an implementation of a real-time motion vector based object-tracking application. The evaluation shows that the application largely behaves as expected when resource availability and selections of configurations of feature extractor and classification algorithms vary. The evaluation also shows that increasing QoS requirements can be met by allocating additional CPUs for parallel processing, with only minor overhead.

Processing capacity and sentence comprehension in patients with alzheimer's disease

Abstract A sentence-picture matching task was used to test the ability of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and age- and education-matched control subjects to interpret nine different sentences. These sentences differed on two dimensions…syntactic complexity and number of propositions. Subjects were tested on this task with no concurrent task (alone) and while concurrently remembering a digit load that was one less than their span or equivalent to their span. Neither group of subjects showed an effect of syntactic complexity, but DAT patients did show an effect of the number of propositions in a sentence. For all subjects, comprehension of sentences with more propositions was more greatly affected by larger digit loads, but comprehension of more complex syntactic structures was not. The performance of DAT patients was more affected than that of the control subjects on the digit task, but they were not disproportionately impaired on the sentence types which were more complex or had more propositions compared to normals. The results are discussed in relationship to the hypothesis that there is a sentence comprehension impairment in DAT that is related to the processing resource requirements of different aspects of the sentence comprehension process.

Prediction-based dynamic load-sharing heuristics

Presents dynamic load-sharing heuristics that use predicted resource requirements of processes to manage workloads in a distributed system. A previously developed statistical pattern-recognition method is employed for resource prediction. While nonprediction-based heuristics depend on a rapidly changing system status, the new heuristics depend on slowly changing program resource usage patterns. Furthermore, prediction-based heuristics can be more effective since they use future requirements rather than just the current system state. Four prediction-based heuristics, two centralized and two distributed, are presented. Using trace driven simulations, they are compared against random scheduling and two effective nonprediction based heuristics. Results show that the prediction-based centralized heuristics achieve up to 30% better response times than the nonprediction centralized heuristic, and that the prediction-based distributed heuristics achieve up to 50% improvements relative to their nonpredictive counterpart.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Effects of Aging on Subjective Workload and Performance

Demographics indicate that the population in the United States and other industrialized nations is growing older, and that the number of older workers and systems users can be expected to increase substantially over the next several decades. In order to assess possible differences between age groups the mental workload experienced by older adults as compared to that experienced by younger adults was investigated. Two tasks were utilized to assess short term memory (continuous recognition) and psychomotor (first-order unstable tracking) performance. The workload of each task was assessed with the Subjective Workload Assessment Technique (SWAT). Memory task performance measures and subjective workload ratings indicated a decrement in performance and an increase in workload for the older group relative to the younger group. Psychomotor task performance measures and subjective workload ratings indicated no difference between the age groups. It is hypothesized that the memory task makes greater demands on central processing resources than the psychomotor task used in this study. In support of this hypothesis, an analysis of the changes in ratings on the individual SWAT dimensions of time, mental effort and psychological stress revealed that an increase occurred only on the mental effort dimension for the memory task. This study implies that designers should 1) reduce or provide design features that lessen memory laden task performance for older workers, and 2) give more weight to the reduction of central processing resource requirements in trade-off studies.

A normative-descriptive approach to hierarchical team resource allocation

Dynamic, distributed, human team resource allocation and task processing is considered in an abstracted Navy-like command and control environment. A hierarchical team of one leader and three subordinates is to process multiple types of randomly arriving tasks (threats) that have different processing resource requirements, time requirements, values, and deadlines. Each subordinate is responsible for processing a subset of these tasks. Two kinds of team leader (resource coordinator) are considered: an active leader who transfers resources among the subordinates, and a passive leader who provides offline guidance only. The individual decision-making and coordination processes of both types of leader are described and analytically modeled. A team-in-the-loop experiment provides data to compare with model predictions. The self-centered bias (wherein human decision-makers overvalue their own responsibilities) is identified as a major contributor to model-data mismatch. Incorporating such human cognitive limitations and biases into the normative models successfully replicates the experimental results. >

On the self contained modelling of DB/DC systems

This paper discusses the modelling of DB/DC systems operating in a demand paging environment. As an extension of an earlier definition of Denning a class of systems is defined, those operating with "working set integrity", for which one can obtain system response parameters solely from the resource requirements of the input processes when running in isolation. No external information such as a miss ratio curve from another systems environment is required. The interdependence between the resource requirements of processes when running in a systems environment and the system performance parameters is faced directly and expressed as a set of simultaneous equations. The emphasis is on the effect of the sharing of a common set of pages among the active set of processes. Both unrestricted shared usage and usage with locking are treated.