Social tagging systems have attracted plenty of research endeavors recently. The dynamic models of tag generation or tag usage are one of the key subjects of inquiry. However, the existing models do not well explain the “staged” power-law distribution of tag usage frequencies as observed in various social tagging systems. To cope with this, a new tag-generation model is proposed in this paper, which is based on a preferential selection mechanism influenced by the combinatorial effects of system recommendation and resource multidimensionality. Furthermore, to validate the model, the simulative results under different parameter combinations are compared with the distributions of tag usage frequencies in datasets from three famous social tagging systems, namely Delicious.com, Last.fm and Flickr. For different categories of resources of the three systems, three tag usage patterns can be identified, namely the power-law distribution with two plateaus, the power-law distribution with one plateau, and the standard power-law distribution. All the three patterns can be well fitted and explained by the proposed model.

This paper proposes a knowledge-scientific approach to evaluation of community service systems from the viewpoints of knowledge creation, consciousness reform, and value co-creation. A concrete example of the community service system treated here is an education program for old men to find their reason for living after the retirement. After introducing this program and the traditional evaluation methods for such a program, the paper emphasizes the necessity of developing new evaluation methods for such a community service system based on knowledge science. The paper proposes a new evaluation framework and reports an actual evaluation result using the interview data from participants in that program.

It is well known that hierarchies of mathematical programming formulations with different numbers of variables and constraints have a considerable impact regarding the quality of solutions obtained once these formulations are fed to a commercial solver. In addition, even if dimensions are kept the same, changes in formulations may largely influence solvability and quality of results. This becomes evident especially if redundant constraints are used. We propose a related framework for information collection based on these constraints. We exemplify by means of a well-known combinatorial optimization problem from the knapsack problem family, i.e., the multidimensional multiple-choice knapsack problem (MMKP). This incorporates a relationship of the MMKP to some generalized set partitioning problems. Moreover, we investigate an application in maritime shipping and logistics by means of the dynamic berth allocation problem (DBAP), where optimal solutions are reached from the root node within the solver.

This study looks at the historical reliability of the agent-based model of the global energy system. We present a mathematical framework for the agent-based model calibration and sensitivity analysis based on historical observations. Simulation consistency with the historical record is measured as a distance between two vectors of data points and inference on parameter values is done from the probability distribution of this stochastic estimate. Proposed methodology is applied to the model of the global energy system. Some model properties and limitations followed from calibration results are discussed.

For large multinational companies, the complex production process of their finished goods usually contains plenty of stages, which constitute a production flow network. Each production stage in the production flow network can be undertaken by one or more suppliers. This study proposes a stochastic programming model for the production flow network oriented supply chain network design problem, which optimizes the decision of allocating stages to suppliers with the objective of minimizing the total expected costs of production and transportation among suppliers under uncertain demands of customers. A local branching based solution method is developed to solve the model. A case study on applying this model to a large automobile company is performed. In addition, some numerical experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model and the efficiency of the proposed solution method.

This paper addresses a dynamic lot sizing problem with bounded inventory and stockout where both no backlogging and backlogging allowed cases are considered. The stockout option means that there is outsourcing in a period only when the inventory level at that period is non-positive. The production capacity is unlimited and production cost functions are linear but with fixed charges. The problem is that of satisfying all demands in the planning horizon at minimal total cost. We show that the no backlogging case can be solved in ) O(T ²) time with general concave inventory holding and outsourcing cost functions where T is the length of the planning horizon. The complexity can be reduced to O(T) when the inventory holding cost functions are also linear and have some realistic properties, even if the outsourcing cost functions remain general concave functions. When the inventory holding and outsourcing cost functions are linear, the backlogging case can be solved in O(T ³logT) time whether the outsourcing level at each period is bounded by the sum of the demand of that period and backlogging level from previous periods, or only by the demand of that period.