Resource Conflict Resolution Research Articles

A LOGIC-ALGEBRAIC METHOD BASED AND CLP-DRIVEN APPROACH TO CONTROL OF CONCOURRENTLY COMPETING CYCLIC PROCESSES

Design of repetitive systems with concurrently executed cyclic processes requires solving a problem of resources conflict resolution. A solution to the problem is a best schedule, which takes into account mutual execution of the processes sharing common resources and certain performance evaluation criterion. The considered problem resolution consists in finding a schedule with no process waiting for access to the shared resources and wherefore leading to controls not requiring resource conflict resolution. The problem is formulated as a task of prototyping of conditions sufficient for existence of a waiting-free n-process execution. The conditions prototyping is then examined within the framework of logic-algebraic method. The illustrative example of the approach proposed is provided.

Doing It for Themselves

Colonial processes of territorial acquisition and state formation have constituted a continuous assault on the political and cultural autonomy of the indigenous peoples of the New World. In recent decades, indigenous claims for land justice and resource sovereignty have posed considerable legal and political challenges for postsettler states. Planning offers an indispensable conceptual and operational lens through which to examine state responses to indigenous claims. The authors use case studies to explore the utility, contribution, and key features of planning undertaken as a means of resolving resource conflicts, enhancing indigenous capacity to regain and manage custodial lands, and developing community autonomy.

Resource Conflicts and Conflict Resolution in Nepal

Resource conflicts are an inevitable part of Nepalese society. Their causes include hierarchical and patron–client social relations, the incompatibility of formal laws, conflicts of interest, perception and belief, competition over scarce resources, ambiguity over roles and responsibilities, the unwillingness of the state to respond to social, economic, political and technological changes, corruption, and bad governance. The present study analyzes resource conflicts and practices used to resolve them in Nepal. It was conducted in 6 districts of Nepal, representing the mountain, hill and terai regions, using focus groups and informal discussions, semi-structured and key informant interviews, observation, life histories, and a questionnaire survey. It concludes that existing, legally engineered formal conflict resolution systems are administratively complicated, expensive, elitist, heavily influenced by money and power, non-transparent, and inaccessible to the poor, and are therefore hardly adequate to address growing conflicts in Nepal. Likewise, informal systems are also distorted and inherently biased towards those with power. Hence modernization of existing formal conflict resolution systems is urgently needed in Nepal.

Monkey Business and Business Ethics

To what degree has biology influenced and shaped the development of moral systems? One way to determine the extent to which human moral systems might be the product of natural selection is to explore behaviour in other species that is analogous and perhaps homologous to our own. Many non-human primates, for example, have similar methods to humans for resolving, managing, and preventing conflicts of interests within their groups. Such methods, which include reciprocity and food sharing, reconciliation, consolation, conflict intervention, and mediation, are the very building blocks of moral systems in that they are based on and facilitate cohesion among individuals and reflect a concerted effort by community members to find shared solutions to social conflict. Furthermore, these methods of resource distribution and conflict resolution often require or make use of capacities for empathy, sympathy, and sometimes even community concern. Non-human primates in societies in which such mechanisms are present may not be exactly moral beings, but they do show signs of a sense of social regularity that—just like the norms and rules underlying human moral conduct—promotes a mutually satisfactory modus vivendi.

Collaborative governance versus constitutional politics: decision rules for sustainability from Australia’s South East Queensland forest agreement

Australia’s Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) (1995–2000) involved a national program of bioregional assessment for native forest conservation and timber resource management. Eleven assessments covering 46 million ha or 6% of Australia, resulted in nine agreements (RFAs) between federal and state governments. While groundbreaking in some respects, however, the program had significant governance problems. Its main outcomes—intergovernmental agreements—were intended to overcome rather than resolve competing bodies of public opinion, and hence always risked entrenching rather than addressing underlying policy conflicts. This article reviews the problems inherent in the official approach, by contrasting it with the outcome reached in the major forest assessment not translated into an RFA. In September 1999, the South East Queensland assessment resulted in an agreement between lead timber production interests, key environmental NGOs and the state government, although rejected by the national government. Unique in Australia and rare in the world, this state-stakeholder agreement suggests the emergence of new decision rules for long-term resolution of biodiversity and natural resource conflicts. Consistently with other case studies, these centre on a fresh approach to integration of conflicting values, and the need for governments to accept more collaborative roles in environmental governance.

Change and Conflict in Land and Water Use: Resource Valuation in Conflict Resolution among Competing Users

Conflicts among competing resource users have become more frequent in the Southeast. Political and legal processes and economic values will play major roles in negotiations to resolve competing resource uses. Resource economists can contribute to resource conflict resolution in several ways, such as facilitating negotiation, asserting importance of institutional mechanisms, analyzing incentives, and evaluating resources.

An Exact Procedure for the Resource-Constrained Weighted Earliness–Tardiness Project Scheduling Problem

In this paper we study the resource-constrained project scheduling problem with weighted earliness–tardinesss penalty costs. Project activities are assumed to have a known deterministic due date, a unit earliness as well as a unit tardiness penalty cost and constant renewable resource requirements. The objective is to schedule the activities in order to minimize the total weighted earliness–tardinesss penalty cost of the project subject to the finish–start precedence constraints and the constant renewable resource availability constraints. With these features the problem becomes highly attractive in just-in-time environments. We introduce a depth-first branch-and-bound algorithm which makes use of extra precedence relations to resolve resource conflicts and relies on a fast recursive search algorithm for the unconstrained weighted earliness–tardinesss problem to compute lower bounds. The procedure has been coded in Visual C++, version 4.0 under Windows NT. Both the recursive search algorithm and the branch-and-bound procedure have been validated on a randomly generated problem set.

Regional Forest Agreements: Resolving Resource Conflicts or Managing Resource Politics?

Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) are the latest institutional response to conflict over the allocation, use and management of forests in Australia. RFAs involve a process of resource assessment leading to a long‐term agreement between federal and state governments. This paper examines the approach to assessment being used in RFAs with reference to the literature on the practice of resource and environmental assessment and the changing shape of intergovernmental relations in Australia. It concludes that RFAs have not succeeded in resolving conflict over forestry, as was intended, but have successfully managed forest politics, both between governments and in the broader policy community.

Hybrid simulation for resolving resource conflicts in train traffic rescheduling

Train traffic rescheduling is characterized by its dynamic, ever changing nature. Because of its complexity and dynamic behavior, simulation modelling is becoming a popular method to evaluate the effectiveness and appropriateness of train traffic rescheduling proposals and strategies. Simulation can even be a powerful tool to support resolving resource conflicts in train traffic rescheduling. Normal event-driven simulation and network-based simulation methods have been proposed for train traffic rescheduling. The former is a traditional event-based discrete simulation method; the latter simulates through calculating the longest path to every node in a network that is transformed from a normal train traffic diagram. For more efficiently resolving resource conflicts in train traffic rescheduling, this paper proposes a hybrid method of the network-based simulation and the event-driven simulation. The proposed method attempts to obtain the advantages from both previous methods and reduce their shortcomings. Simple examples are used as case studies to illustrate the proposed method, and the effect of the algorithm of the proposed method on overall performance is examined by experiments. The experiment results show that the proposed method can be more easily and efficiently applied to resolve resource conflicts in train traffic rescheduling.

Introduction to Wildlife and Fisheries: An Integrated Approach

The book - how and why! what is wildlife and fisheries? Part 1 The biota: ecological concepts population dynamics and structure genetics in relation to wildlife and fisheries nutrition and environmental physiology behaviour sampling the biota determination and use of age, growth, and sex information population assessment managing the biota endangered and threatened species. Part 2 The habitat: habitat types habitat sampling and assessment habitat degradation habitat management. Part 3 The human users: assessment of human users management of the human component in wildlife and fisheries wildlife and fisheries legislation wildlife and fisheries law enforcement natural resource related organizations, biopolitics and conflict resolution, and planning.

A Branch-and-Bound Procedure for the Generalized Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem

In this paper a branch-and-bound procedure is described for scheduling project activities subject to precedence diagramming type of precedence relations, ready times, due dates, and variable multiple resource availability constraints, where the objective is to minimize project duration. The procedure is based on a depth-first solution strategy in which nodes in the solution tree represent resource and precedence feasible partial schedules. Branches emanating from a parent node correspond to exhaustive and minimal combinations of activities, the delay of which resolves resource conflicts at each parent node. A precedence based lower bound and several dominance rules are introduced in order to restrict the growth of the solutions tree. The procedure has been programmed in the C language. Extensive computational experience is reported.

A Branch and Bound Procedure for the Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem with Discounted Cash Flows

Management of projects is complicated by the scarcity of resources required to execute them. Limited resources usually extend the project completion times beyond those determined by CPM/PERT. Several solution procedures have been developed for solving the resource constrained project scheduling problem. One objective commonly used for these problems is to complete the project as early as possible (minimize makespan). The problem considered in this paper is a resource constrained project scheduling problem, with the added features that there are cash flows associated with the project activities, and the objective is to schedule the project activities in such a way that the net present value of cash flows is maximized. With these features the problem becomes financially motivated and more realistic. We introduce a branch and bound procedure to solve the resource constrained project scheduling problem with discounted cash flows. Our procedure exploits the known fact that potential resource violations can be eliminated by introducing additional precedence relations between certain project activities. Specifically, we use the “minimal delaying alternatives” concept to resolve resource conflicts. The bounds in the branch and bound procedure are computed by solving Payment Scheduling Problems, which can be formulated as linear programs and by that are well-solvable. We test our procedure computationally on a set of 90 test problems from the literature and compare it with the only other exact procedure we know of.

An efficient optimal solution procedure for the preemptive resource-constrained project scheduling problem

In this paper a branch-and-bound procedure is described for scheduling project activities subject to precedence and resource constraints, where activities can be preempted at any discrete time instant and where the objective is to minimize the project duration. The procedure is based on a depth-first solution strategy in which nodes in the solution tree represent resource and precedence feasible partial schedules. Branches emanating from a parent node correspond to exhaustive and minimal combinations of activities, the delay of which resolves resource conflicts at each parent node. A precedence based lower bound and several dominance rules are introduced in order to restrict the growth of the solutions tree. The solution procedure has been programmed in the C language and extensive computational experience is reported.

Multiagent coordination and cooperation in a distributed dynamic environment with limited resources

Coordination and cooperation are two major concerns in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) systems. How can a group of geographically distributed agents properly allocate a set of tasks among themselves while satisfying different types of constraints? Also, in an environment of limited resources, how can agents resolve resource conflicts and effectively accomplish tasks? We have examined these two problems and have developed new techniques to promote multiagent coordination and cooperation. A novel method of negotiation allows agents to bid for tasks based upon the agents' capabilities. Furthermore, the use of a threshold value ensures that only the best agents for a task become task commanders and renders some tasks to be renegotiated as agents improve their bids. To resolve resource conflicts, a technique called ‘hierarchical iterative conflict resolution’ has been implemented. This allows conflicts to be resolved in an iterative manner, based upon a hierarchy of task priorities. Agents with higher priority tasks have the authority to borrow resources from agents with lower priority tasks. It ensures that higher priority tasks will be solved before those of lower priority. These new techniques were employed in a DAI testbed which simulates an air war environment.

Urban and environmental issues in East and Southeast Asian coastal lowlands

Rau, J.L., 1994. Urban and environmental issues in East and Southeast Asian coastal lowlands. In: E.F.Y. de Mulder (Editor). Engineering Geology of Quaternary deposits. Eng. Geol., 37: 25–29. Rapid progress has been made in the application of geologic principles for land use planning in large Asian cities and coastal areas. The rapid rate of growth of most Asian cities makes it imperative that geoscientists continue to develop thematic maps derived from basic geologic maps at appropriate scales for layman. More work needs to be done to make coastal zone managers more aware of the important contributions that geoscientists can make to the resolution of resource conflicts in the coastal zone. Thematic maps prepared by Geological Surveys for planners have proven useful in a number of countries in East and Southeast Asia. Effective programs for providing all types of geological information to planners have been developed in China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. A number of countries in South Asia also have produced large-scale geological and thematic maps for land-use planners. Especially good progress has been made in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. India has had an environmental geology programme for over 20 years and the Geological Survey of India has prepared thematic maps for planners in dozens of its larger cities. However, more should be done to show the usefulness of geologic data for planning decisions. Thematic maps prepared by geoscientists are not yet in widespread use in Asia. Geologic maps, for the most part, should be reinterpreted before they can be used by planners and decision makers. More research should be focused on what types of information planners need and how it should be transmitted to them by the Geological Survey. Planners and geologists continue to work in isolation in more than 50% of the Asian countries. Social and economic problems receive far more attention than single geologic events that can destroy a city in a few seconds and take the lives of tens of thousands of people. The author believes, and hopes, that by the year 2000 environmental and urban geology will be one of the highest priorities for Geological Surveys in the region.

A Branch-and-Bound Procedure for the Multiple Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem

In this paper a branch-and-bound procedure is described for scheduling the activities of a project of the PERT/CPM variety subject to precedence and resource constraints where the objective is to minimize project duration. The procedure is based on a depth-first solution strategy in which nodes in the solution tree represent resource and precedence feasible partial schedules. Branches emanating from a parent node correspond to exhaustive and minimal combinations of activities, the delay of which resolves resource conflicts at each parent node. Precedence and resource-based bounds described in the paper are combined with new dominance pruning rules to rapidly fathom major portions of the solution tree. The procedure is programmed in the C language for use on both a mainframe and a personal computer. The procedure has been validated using a standard set of test problems with between 7 and 50 activities requiring up to three resource types each. Computational experience on a personal computer indicates that the procedure is 11.6 times faster than the most rapid solution procedure reported in the literature while requiring less computer storage. Moreover, problems requiring large amounts of computer time using existing approaches for solving this problem type are rapidly solved with our procedure using the dominance rules described, resulting in a significant reduction in the variability in solution times as well.

Explaining Choices in Procedural and Distributive Justice Across Cultures

A previous study (Leung, Bond, & Schwartz, 1990) established that an expectancy‐valence model could be used effectively to explain behaviours in three social domains both within and across cultures. In this study the model was applied to the domains of resource allocation and conflict resolution in order to pinpoint which expectancies and which valences were carrying the explanatory weight of the respondents' behavioural strategies. For both Israeli and Hong Kong students the expectancies and, less strongly, the valences tapping harmony and performance quality were important for resource allocation; those tapping animosity reduction and process control, for conflict resolution. Suggestions were offered for broadening the net of explanatory constructs for future work aimed at specifying subjective factors associated with justice‐related behaviours.

Constrained resource sharing and conflict resolution in Hebe

Hardware resources can be shared to reduce the area of the resulting design. The synthesis system must ensure that no resource conflicts arise due to simultaneous access of a shared hardware resource. With traditional scheduling formulations where operations are statically assigned to control steps, conflict resolution simply determines whether two operations can execute concurrently based on their control step assignment. In this case, operations are assumed to have fixed execution delay. For hardware models that supports external synchronization and handshaking, however, operations may have unbounded execution delay, e.g., detecting the rising edge of a signal. The presence of unbounded delay operations invalidates the traditional scheduling and conflict resolution approaches. We formulate in this paper conflict resolution as the task of serializing operation bound to the same hardware resource. A technique called constrained conflict resolution is presented to resolve resource conflicts such that the resulting design satisfies the required timing and handshaking requirements. The timing constraint topology is used to reduce the computation time of the algorithm. This technique extends the relative scheduling formulation to support resource sharing under timing constraints. We describe both exact and heuristic algorithms to resolve resource conflicts; these algorithms are implemented in a synthesis system called Hebe that is targeted towards the synthesis of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit designs. Results of applying the system to the design of benchmark and complex ASIC designs are presented.

Coordination as distributed search in a hierarchical behavior space

It is theorized that the process of coordination is a distributed search through a hierarchical space of agent behaviors. By specifying agent activities along multiple dimensions and at different levels of abstraction, the hierarchical behavior space provides a single, rich representation that agents can use to organize, plan, and schedule their collective actions. A computational instance of the evolving theory, which implements a particular choice of distributed protocol, local algorithm, metrics, and heuristics, as applied to resolving resource conflicts in an unstructured delivery domain, is described. In this domain, agents that initially do not know with whom they might interact exploit the hierarchical behavior representation to selectively exchange more details about themselves until they can resolve conflicting behaviors. It was experimentally demonstrated how the hierarchical protocol and multidimensional representation provide powerful and practical mechanisms for coordinating these agents, and important research issues to be addressed are highlighted.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Australian natural resources law and the Gordon‐Franklin dam controversy: a resource economic analysis

This paper identifies and discusses, within a resource economics perspective, some of the most important legal dimensions of the Gordon‐Franklin dam controversy in Australia. This analysis demonstrates the existence of specific shortcomings in the Australian natural resources legislation. Three basic changes in this legislation are proposed to palliate these shortcomings. These are: (i) the requirement that natural resource use decisions be based on a systematic decision‐making procedure, the specifics of which are presented in the paper; (ii) the opening up of these decisions to the process of judicial review; and (iii) the extension of locus standi rules to individuals or groups who do not have a proprietary interest in a natural resource case. It is shown that these changes would provide a framework for the peaceful resolution of other natural resource conflicts in Australia.