Undesirable Behavior Research Articles

Lead pulling as a welfare concern in pet dogs: What can veterinary professionals learn from current research?

Veterinary professionals (VPs) are often the first source of advice for clients struggling with their dog's behaviour, and pulling on the lead is a commonplace undesirable behaviour VPs will encounter regularly in practice. Excluding bites, being pulled over while walking on a lead is the leading cause of non-fatal dog-related injuries in the UK. This narrative review investigates lead pulling as a welfare concern in pet dogs, highlighting aspects of the literature of particular interest to VPs. Lead pulling could negatively affect walk quality, frequency and duration, causing weight gain, while decreased environmental enrichment could trigger other undesirable behaviours. Aversive equipment to prevent lead pulling can cause pain, distress and injury, but even equipment considered humane can have welfare consequences. Punitive training methods could cause dogs stress, fear and anxiety and trigger aggressive behaviour. While these lead pulling outcomes are welfare concerns in themselves, they could also weaken dog-owner attachment, a risk factor in pet dog relinquishment. Given lead pulling could affect the welfare of patients in a VPs care, clinical implications and opportunities for client education are outlined. Educating clients on humane prevention and modification of lead pulling could make walks easier, safer and more enjoyable, with positive outcomes for clients, canine welfare and the practice.

A self-regulatory perspective on the link between customer mistreatment and employees’ displaced workplace deviance: the buffering role of mindfulness

PurposeDrawing from self-regulation theories, this study aims to present a model linking customer mistreatment to hotel employees’ displaced workplace deviance via self-regulatory depletion, with disposition-based mindfulness as a first‐stage moderator.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a multisource, multiwave investigation with 245 focal–coworker dyads at 14 full-service hotels in southern China. Descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis and regression analysis were performed.FindingsThe results demonstrated the mediating role of self-regulatory depletion in provoking hotel employees’ displaced deviant reactions to customer mistreatment. Additionally, employees with high trait mindfulness are less vulnerable to self-regulatory depletion and, thus, less likely to exhibit displaced workplace deviance.Practical implicationsThis study enables hospitality administrators to understand that organizations and their employees, whether directly mistreated by customers, are potential victims of such negative events. Hospitality organizations should enhance mindfulness-based interventions and provide more humane care for employees to maintain their self-regulatory abilities, thereby reducing displaced workplace deviance.Originality/valueFirst, in contrast to studies focusing primarily on internal factors that trigger employees’ deviant responses, the research suggests that mistreatment by external customers is a potentially meaningful yet largely unexamined antecedent of workplace deviance. Second, this study moves beyond “self-gain” explanations, suggesting that employees display deviance not because of a malicious intent to harm the organization or its members but because they are incapable of controlling their undesirable behaviors. Third, the research highlights how mindfulness mitigates customer mistreatment and displaced workplace deviance relationships.

Saving the moral self: unethical leadership and employee behaviors – a moral cleansing perspective

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate the concept of vicarious moral cleansing and scrutinize whether unethical behavior of leaders initiate moral cleansing in subordinates or not. This study also highlights a boundary condition under which employees are motivated to cleanse their moral self-image through increased organizational citizenship behaviors and decreased counterproductive work behaviors.Design/methodology/approachThe study is quantitative based on hypothesis testing. By adopting convenience sampling technique, employees working at all managerial levels of service sector organizations were asked to fill out the questionnaires. Being a time-lagged study, data for independent variable (unethical leadership) and moderator (relational self-construal) were collected at T1, data for mediator (moral self-image) were collected at T2 and data for outcomes (OCBs, CWBs) were collected at T3 from same respondents. To rule out the possibility of common method bias and social desirability bias, a multi-wave design was adopted and respondents were asked to provide unique keys/IDs instead of their names.FindingsThis study investigated the impact that unethical leaders impose on employee self-concept. Moreover, this study also explored the motivational tendencies of moral self-image. Findings suggest that employees' desirable or undesirable behaviors against leader are dependent upon the perceptions related with their own role, self-image and perception of leader's integrity and intentions. Leader's unethicality is perceived threatening for their own moral self-image and they deal with it constructively. This study has laid the foundation for presence of vicarious moral cleansing in organizational setup, and it is advised that researchers must investigate this phenomenon in different settings to provide useful insights.Research limitations/implicationsDue to lack of resources, employing a pure longitudinal research design was not feasible, and therefore a time-lagged research design was used to gather data from only two cities of Pakistan. However, authors believe that a longitudinal research design, with data collection from a larger sample, will provide more fine-grained results. Secondly, use of perceived leader's integrity scale to measure unethical leadership is another limitation. Although the authors tried to address this issue by conducting an EFA and adopting only suitable items, yet a new scale which is able to measure the true essence of unethical leadership ought to be developed.Originality/valueUse of moral self-image as an indicator of moral cleansing is an additional contribution of this study, as previous studies used levels of guilt as driving force behind moral cleansing and compensatory cleansing. Most of the studies on unethical leadership as well as moral cleansing took place in the Western context and scholars' stress that culture can substantially influence outcomes of these constructs. Thus, this study extends the literature on moral cleansing and moral self-regulation by developing and testing a model in cultural settings of Pakistan.

Error Reduction in Vision-Based Multirotor Landing System.

New applications are continuously appearing with drones as protagonists, but all of them share an essential critical maneuver—landing. New application requirements have led the study of novel landing strategies, in which vision systems have played and continue to play a key role. Generally, the new applications use the control and navigation systems embedded in the aircraft. However, the internal dynamics of these systems, initially focused on other tasks such as the smoothing trajectories between different waypoints, can trigger undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose a landing system based on monocular vision and navigation information to estimate the helipad global position. In addition, the global estimation system includes a position error correction module by cylinder space transformation and a filtering system with a sliding window. To conclude, the landing system is evaluated with three quality metrics, showing how the proposed correction system together with stationary filtering improves the raw landing system.

The Impact of Puppet Theatre Among Preschoolers Socio-Emotional Abilities Development

"In general, undesirable behaviors of people and particularly of children occur due to a lack of socioemotional skills and competences. The training and development of these skills begins in the family environment, the first environment with which the preschooler came into contact. However, preschool is the period of accelerated development on all levels: physical, cognitive and socioemotional. These periods develop the basic skills (cognitive, emotional and social) so necessary for adaptation to adult life. From the moment when children are received in kindergarten, the teacher must model their teaching discourse and behavior, in order to establish a network of appropriate and secure social relationships, in which each participant (child) to feel valued and confident, to express his inner experiences: thoughts, emotions, desires, motivations and so on. The aim of this study was to implement and test the effectiveness of an educational intervention program based on puppet theatre in order to develop emotional abilities (recognition of personal and other people’s emotions) and social abilities (social interaction, problem solving, respect for rules and tolerance). The results showed that puppet theatre contributes statistically significantly to the development of socio-emotional abilities in preschoolers, and after calculating the effect size, a strong effect was demonstrated for emotional expressiveness, regulation of socio-emotional response, empathy, self-image and cooperation, and in terms of social interaction the proposed intervention program had a medium effect."

Mechanism of Control Instability of Control Function Installed to Grid-following Inverter and Development of Damping Controller for Stable Operation

Conventional synchronous generators have been replaced by renewable energy source such as photovoltaics generation and wind turbine generation interconnected through inverters. As the capacity of synchronous generators interconnected to the power system decrease, the power system stability can be gradually jeopardized. Therefore, these inverters may be required to have some control functions in grid-interconnection code to support power system stabilization. On the other hand, it is known that the response of some control functions become unstable and undesired oscillatory behavior appears depending on the power system conditions such as low short circuit ratio. In consequence, not only the expected power system stabilization is not obtained, but also the power quality may be degraded. In this paper, the mechanism of these instabilities is clarified by using a simplified root mean square model, and a damping controller applicable to grid-following (GFL) inverter is developed. It is shown that the damping of the oscillatory behavior could be improved by applying the proposed controller using eigenvalue analysis and time domain simulation. This contribution is useful for the appropriate operation of the control function installed to GFL inverter.

'That Time of the Month' - Investigating the Influence of the Menstrual Cycle and Oral Contraceptives on the Brain Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

The stereotypic and oversimplified relationship between female sex hormones and undesirable behavior dates to the earliest days of human society, as already the ancient Greek word for the uterus, "hystera" indicated an aversive connection. Remaining and evolving throughout the centuries, transcending across cultures and various aspects of everyday life, its perception was only recently reframed. Contemporarily, the complex interaction of hormonal phases (i. e., the menstrual cycle), hormonal medication (i. e., oral contraceptives), women's psychological well-being, and behavior is the subject of multifaceted and more reflected discussions. A driving force of this ongoing paradigm shift was the introduction of this highly interesting and important topic into the realm of scientific research. This refers to neuroscientific research as it enables a multimodal approach combining aspects of physiology, medicine, and psychology. Here a growing body of literature points towards significant alterations of both brain function, such as lateralization of cognitive functions, and structure, such as gray matter concentrations, due to fluctuations and changes in hormonal levels. This especially concerns female sex hormones. However, the more research is conducted within this field, the less reliable these observations and derived insights appear. This may be due to two particular factors: measurement inconsistencies and diverse hormonal phases accompanied by interindividual differences. The first factor refers to the prominent unreliability of one of the primarily utilized neuroscientific research instruments: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This unreliability is seemingly present in paradigms and analyses, and their interplay, and is additionally affected by the second factor. In more detail, hormonal phases and levels further influence neuroscientific results obtained through fMRI as outcomes vary drastically across different cycle phases and medication. This resulting vast uncertainty thus tremendously hinders the further advancement of our understanding of how female sex hormones might alter brain structure and function and, ultimately, behavior.This review summarizes parts of the current state of research and outlines the essential requirements to further investigate and understand the female brain's underlying physiological and anatomical features.

Effectiveness of peer-mediated intervention on social skills for children with autism spectrum disorder: a randomized controlled trial.

BackgroundPeer-mediated intervention (PMI) is an intervention that teaches normally developing peers to help children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) actively participate in social interactions. Previous studies have shown that PMI applied to school settings is effective for children with ASD, but more multiple-baseline single-subject design. Many questions are still not clear due to the large clinical variability in children with ASD. This study investigated the effectiveness of PMI on social skills of children with ASD at varying symptom levels and analyzed the specific changes.MethodsThis study used a randomized, single-blind, parallel-controlled design to analyze the effect of PMI in a hospital setting. Fifty-five children aged 4–12 years were diagnosed with ASD by clinicians using the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and stratified randomly allocated to either the experimental group or the control group using the envelope method. The experimental group utilized PMI, whereas the control group utilized behavioral therapy based on applied behavior analysis (ABA) [early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI)]. This study primarily utilized the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) to evaluate the social performance of autistic children prior to and after the intervention.ResultsFifty-five participants were recruited and analyzed, the experimental group (n=29; mild to moderate n=18, severe n=11) and the control group (n=26; mild to moderate n=15, severe n=11). After the intervention, the experimental group’s SRS score fell significantly more than the control group’s (t=−3.918, P=0.000), d=−1.043; the mild to moderate subgroup experienced the same situation (H=17.811, P=0.009), d=−1.642. At the same time, the decline in social communication scores was significantly greater in the experimental group compared to the control group (t=−3.869, P=0.000), and the 95% confidence interval was −10.067 to −3.193. The social motivation of the mild-to-moderate subgroup of the experimental group (H=16.894, P=0.011), −3.000 (25th percentile, 75th percentile: −3.000, 0.000), and the behavioral patterns of autism (H=18.150, P=0.006), −3.000 (25th percentile, 75th percentile: −5.000, 0.000), the decreased value was significantly larger.ConclusionsPMI therapy can increase social motivation in children with mild to moderate ASD, minimize undesirable behavior patterns, effectively improve overall social skills and enhance effective social communication with others.Trial RegistrationChinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR2100049185.

Fault diagnosis in mobile computing using TwinSVM

Introduction: Mobile computing systems (MCS) comes up with the challenge of low communication bandwidth and energy due to the mobile nature of the network. These features sometimes may come up with the undesirable behaviour of the system that eventually affects the efficiency of the system.
 Problem: Fault tolerance in MCS will increase the efficiency of the system even in the presence of faults.
 Objective: The main objective of this work is the development of the Monitoring Framework and Fault Detection and Classification.
 Methodology: For the Node Monitoring and for the detection and classification of faults in the system a neighbourhood comparison-based technique has been proposed. The proposed framework uses Twin Support Vector Machine (TWSVM) algorithm has been applied to build classifier for fault classification in the mobile network.
 Results: The proposed system has been compared with the existing techniques and has been evaluated towards calculating the detection accuracy, latency, energy consumption, packet delivery ratio, false classification rate and false positive rate.
 Conclusion: The proposed framework performs better in terms of all the selected parameters.

Children at Risk in the Preschool Period: Preschool Teachers’ Opinions

This research was planned to analyze preschool teachers’ opinions about children at risk and to identify their experiences with children in different risk groups in their classes. A basic qualitative research design was utilized for an in-depth examination of how preschool teachers defined the concept of children at risk, their opinions on children at risk belonging to different categories, the most frequently encountered risk groups in classrooms, and the difficulties they experience with these children in the classroom. The data of the study were collected through semi-structured interviews with 10 preschool teachers selected by criterion sampling method. The obtained data were coded, categorized into themes, and evaluated with content analysis. The participating preschool teachers defined children at risk as children whose development is adversely affected, whose needs are not met, and who are growing up in insecure environments. They are children who are subjected to neglect and abuse, grow up in broken homes or in unfavorable conditions, are delinquents or drug addicts, are refugees, are Internet addicts, grow up in families with many children, live on the street, or are exploited for labor. The participating preschool teachers stated that they mostly encountered children living in broken families due to divorce/death in their professional experience. The problems encountered by these preschool teachers while working with children at risk in their classrooms were listed as difficulties in classroom management, undesirable behaviors, and problems caused by lack of self-care skills.

Self-Explaining Social Robots: An Explainable Behavior Generation Architecture for Human-Robot Interaction.

In recent years, the ability of intelligent systems to be understood by developers and users has received growing attention. This holds in particular for social robots, which are supposed to act autonomously in the vicinity of human users and are known to raise peculiar, often unrealistic attributions and expectations. However, explainable models that, on the one hand, allow a robot to generate lively and autonomous behavior and, on the other, enable it to provide human-compatible explanations for this behavior are missing. In order to develop such a self-explaining autonomous social robot, we have equipped a robot with own needs that autonomously trigger intentions and proactive behavior, and form the basis for understandable self-explanations. Previous research has shown that undesirable robot behavior is rated more positively after receiving an explanation. We thus aim to equip a social robot with the capability to automatically generate verbal explanations of its own behavior, by tracing its internal decision-making routes. The goal is to generate social robot behavior in a way that is generally interpretable, and therefore explainable on a socio-behavioral level increasing users' understanding of the robot's behavior. In this article, we present a social robot interaction architecture, designed to autonomously generate social behavior and self-explanations. We set out requirements for explainable behavior generation architectures and propose a socio-interactive framework for behavior explanations in social human-robot interactions that enables explaining and elaborating according to users' needs for explanation that emerge within an interaction. Consequently, we introduce an interactive explanation dialog flow concept that incorporates empirically validated explanation types. These concepts are realized within the interaction architecture of a social robot, and integrated with its dialog processing modules. We present the components of this interaction architecture and explain their integration to autonomously generate social behaviors as well as verbal self-explanations. Lastly, we report results from a qualitative evaluation of a working prototype in a laboratory setting, showing that (1) the robot is able to autonomously generate naturalistic social behavior, and (2) the robot is able to verbally self-explain its behavior to the user in line with users' requests.

A New Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization Based PID of the Direct Torque Control for a Doubly Fed Induction Motor

Due to its advantages, the Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller has been the most widely used controller in the industrial sector. It allows linear systems to have good performance, but if the system is subjected to physical variation conditions, the system’s behavior becomes non-linear, in which case the PID controller is insufficient. The use of the PID controller for speed control in rotating machines, such as the doubly fed induction motor (DFIM) is widely used, but the non-linearity of the machine parameters allows for undesirable behaviors, resulting in overshoots and torque ripples. For this reason, several techniques have been adopted to increase the DTC’s robustness. One finds the integration of artificial intelligence as optimization algorithms. These algorithms are used to generate gains close to the optimum, converging the behavior of the DFIM to its optimum. In this work, an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm was proposed to adjust the PID controller gains of the DTC control to control the DFIM, using a combined weighting cost function, to obtain efficient torque and speed control. This paper presents a new hybrid structure resulting from the intelligent ACO-DTC control implemented on Matlab-Simulink. The performance results extracted from the simulation showed the effectiveness of the intelligent ACO-DTC control, which provides satisfactory performance in terms of rapidity, stability, precision, and torque ripples compared to the conventional DTC.

Teacher Well-Being: Teachers’ Goals and Emotions for Students Showing Undesirable Behaviors Count More Than That for Students Showing Desirable Behaviors

Previous findings indicate that the goals of teachers and their experienced emotions when interacting with students play an important role for their well-being. However, studies on the psychological impact of events have shown that the impact of bad events is stronger than the impact of good events. Thus, it may be that teachers’ goals and emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors (e.g., students who disrupt the class, do not finish their work, and have a negative attitude to learning) contribute more to their well-being than teachers’ goals and emotions for students showing desirable behaviors (e.g., students who pay attention in class, do their work on time, and have a positive attitude to learning), a distinction that has not been made in previous research. To examine this question, we measured teachers’ goals and emotions for students showing desirable and undesirable behaviors, and their affective, evaluative, occupational, and psychological well-being (N = 250). The results showed that teachers’ well-being was relatively strongly related to their goals and emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors: The higher the goals and the more positive the emotions, the higher the reported well-being. By contrast, the goals and emotions for students showing desirable behaviors were unrelated to teachers’ well-being. These results demonstrate that the principle of “bad is stronger than good” holds also for the influence of teachers’ goals and emotions on their well-being.

Phenomenological study

Family behaviour is the expression of caring for outpatients with schizophrenia to prolong the relapse. One of the factors is due to family behaviour. Other factors are the lack of support from society, the family, the environment, and the side effects of drugs. This research used a descriptive qualitative with a phenomenological approach. The number of study participants was eight families with family members who experienced schizophrenia. Data collection used in-depth interviews with interview guidelines and field notes. Analyzed using Colaizzi. Resulted in 7 themes, namely: 1) forms of treatment in the healing process; 2) non-adherent treatment; 3) family behaviour; 4) feeling capable of caring for family members with mental disorders; 5) getting unpleasant behaviour; 6) the family accepted the situation; 7) the family saw life as a decree from God. Family behaviour towards mental disorders is identifying understanding of treatment forms in the healing process; non-adherent treatment; family behaviour; feeling able to care for family members with mental disorders; getting undesirable behaviour; the family accepts the situation and the family values ​​life as a decree from God. Ethical Approval” No: 013/KEPK-FIKES UBT/IX/2021.

A Tailored Web-Based Video Intervention (ParentCoach) to Support Parents With Children With Sleeping Problems: User-Centered Design Approach.

BackgroundMany parents frequently struggle with undesirable or problematic behavior (ie, temper tantrums and whining) displayed by their child. To support parents in promoting positive parenting skills (ie, recognizing challenging situations and reacting appropriately), the interactive video e-learning tool ParentCoach was developed. The tool aims to teach parents generic behavioral responses by means of situational learning, tailoring, and problem solving. The first demonstration focused on sleeping problems.ObjectiveThe aim of this paper is to illustrate the user-centered development of ParentCoach.MethodsWe conducted usability, understandability, and acceptance tests among the target group (29 parents, 7 youth health care professionals, and 4 individuals with former lower health literacy) in different phases of the development process via focus groups, interviews, and surveys. This allowed for relevant insights on specifications and user requirements to guide the development and revision of the tool in each iteration.ResultsIterative testing and development allowed for the final demonstration of ParentCoach to be experienced as a relevant and accessible parenting intervention that can be used as a stand-alone program or in combination with another program.ConclusionsThis paper elaborates on the iterative development process and its benefits for the final demonstration of ParentCoach.

Perceived Safety and Security Barriers to Walking and Bicycling: Insights from Milwaukee

Two broad categories of barriers to improving pedestrian and bicycle transportation are concerns about traffic safety and personal security. Gathering residents’ perceptions of these barriers can help public agencies develop effective and equitable strategies to create more sustainable transportation systems. We analyzed open-ended responses to the 2020 Milwaukee Safe and Healthy Streets survey to identify common traffic safety barriers (e.g., driver behavior such as speeding and red-light-running) and personal security barriers (e.g., undesirable street behaviors such as gun violence, robbery, and assault) to walking and bicycling. Then, we developed binary logistic models to identify perceptions of neighborhood characteristics, and individual demographic characteristics related to perceiving walking or bicycling as unsafe with respect to traffic or personal security. For walking, respondents’ traffic safety concerns were most strongly associated with perceptions of fast neighborhood traffic speeds, and personal security concerns were associated with perceptions of poor neighborhood cleanliness. For bicycling, both traffic safety concerns and personal security concerns were most strongly associated with poor neighborhood opportunities for exercise. At an individual level, living in a zero-vehicle household and having self-reported poor health were associated with rating traffic safety for both walking and bicycling as unsafe; having disabilities was associated with rating walking as unsafe. In almost every aspect of our analysis, respondents living in lower-income communities reported greater barriers to pedestrian and bicycle safety and security than residents from wealthier neighborhoods. The results emphasized the importance of both the social and physical environment for improving pedestrian and bicycle transportation.

Flexural Performance of Cement-Treated Sand Reinforced with Geogrids for Use as Sub-Bases of Pavement and Railway Structures.

Cement-treated sand (CTS) exhibits undesirable brittle behavior after the applied stress reaches its peak strength. This research investigates the flexural behavior of CTS that is reinforced with uniaxial geogrid (CTSG). A total of 6% cement content was mixed with sand. Uniaxial geogrids with three different strengths were utilized to create the CTSG samples. The number of reinforcement layers, including single and double reinforcements, was studied. The image processing method was applied to analyze the surface cracks in the specimens. The results show that the geogrid type and the number of reinforcement layers affect the flexural behavior of the CTSG. Geogrid reinforcement changed the behavior of the CTS from a brittle material to a semi-brittle or ductile material because the residual tensile stresses were carried by the geogrids. The high-strength geogrid with a double reinforcement layer proved to be most effective in enhancing the peak strength and toughness with improvement ratios of 1.80 and 11.7, respectively. Single and double reinforcement layers with all geogrid types can reduce surface cracks with average crack reduction ratios of 64% and 83%, respectively. The CTSG can be successfully used as a sub-base layer to increase flexural performance and the lifetime of pavement and railway structures.

A Feline Semiochemical Composition Influences the Cat's Toileting Location Choice.

Simple SummaryUnwanted toileting is amongst the most undesirable behaviors in cats. The aim of this study was to test the effect of a chemical cue derived from cat anal glands on the elimination behavior of domestic cats tested individually. A total of 31 cats were tested for 23 h in an enriched test room where they had the choice between two litter trays, one sprayed with the composition tested and the other with the control. We measured the weight of elimination, the weight of urine, we recorded the type of elimination, and counted the urine spots and stool piles. We also looked at the duration of exploration of litter trays, and what trays the cats were choosing to toilet as a first and second choice. We demonstrated, across all parameters, that cats urinated and defecated significantly less in the litter trays where the chemical cue was sprayed. These results confirm and strengthen those of our previous study. Future studies could explore if a chemical cue derived from male cat anal glands might be used to manage unwanted toileting in cats.Unwanted toileting is amongst the most undesirable behaviors in domestic cats and can lead to conflicts between cats and the communities they are living in. This study aimed to confirm the effect of a semiochemical composition, reconstituted volatile fraction derived from cat anal glands, on the elimination behavior of domestic cats. A total of 31 cats were tested individually, for 23 h, in a blinded randomized choice test, with two litter trays, one sprayed with the treatment and the other with the control. Parameters included elimination weight, urine only weight, the record of the elimination type and counting of urine spots and stools, exploration duration of each litter tray, and first and second choice of litter tray to eliminate. Across all parameters, cats urinated and defecated significantly less in the litter tray where the semiochemical composition was sprayed than in the litter tray where the control was sprayed (for example: elimination weight p < 0.0001; urine only weight p < 0.0001; exploration duration p < 0.0001, and first elimination choice p < 0.0001). These results demonstrate that a semiochemical composition-derived from cat anal glands significantly decreases elimination at the location where it is sprayed. Future research is warranted to explore the possibility to manage unwanted toileting using this semiochemical composition.

Passivity Measures in Cyberphysical Systems Design: An Overview of Recent Results and Applications

Dissipativity theory is an important energy-based framework for the analysis and design of control systems using an input–output approach. Quadratic supply rate functions in particular have been of great interest since their introduction by Jan Willems. Quadratic supply rate dissipativity exhibits many interesting properties, including a tighter relation to stability. Q-dissipativity and its most prominent special case, passivity, are classical tools. However, their relevance to cyberphysical system (CPS) design stems from the fact that these concepts can be extended to more general hybrid/ switched and networked systems. Dissipative and passive systems exhibit a compositional property for parallel and negative feedback interconnections. Thus, by ensuring that each subsystem is passive, a complex system can be constructed to satisfy specific properties by design and avoid undesirable emergent behaviors. Passivity indices also stem from Q-dissipativity. They are measures of passivity margins and further extend the applicability of passivity-based tools to nonpassive systems as well. The indices have been used in designing secure and stable interconnected systems, hybrid systems, and data-driven analysis and control design. Because of these facts, measures of passivity have been further developed for systems with significant cybercomponents. This short article provides a brief overview of of these new findings in the context of CPSs and presents directions for future work.

Resilient Model Predictive Control for Constrained Cyber-Physical Systems Subject to Severe Attacks on the Communication Channels

In this article, a robust model predictive control strategy is developed for networked cyber-physical systems under false data injections. The main feature of the proposed scheme relies on the capability to mitigate undesired system behaviors due to external malicious actions. This is achieved by showing that set-membership conditions allow us to quickly detect data integrity anomalies and, as a consequence, to implement adequate countermeasures. The core of the resulting solution exploits receding horizon and set-theoretic control ideas so that the resilient nature of the virtual control moves is formally put in light. Simulations on a <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$B747-100/200$</tex-math></inline-formula> aircraft model show effectiveness and merits of the proposed resilient control architecture.