Manufacturing Grid: Needs, Concept, and Architecture
As a new approach, grid technology is rapidly used in scientific computing, large-scale data management, and collaborative work. But in the field of manufacturing, the application of grid is just at the beginning. The paper proposes the concept of manufacturing. The needs, definition and architecture of manufacturing gird are discussed, which explains why needs manufacturing grid, what is manufacturing grid and how to construct a manufacturing grid system.

title: An Effective PSO-Based Memetic Algorithm for Flow Shop Scheduling
abstract: This paper proposes an effective particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based memetic algorithm (MA) for the permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSSP) with the objective to minimize the maximum completion time, which is a typical non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard combinatorial optimization problem. In the proposed PSO-based MA (PSOMA), both PSO-based searching operators and some special local searching operators are designed to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities. In particular, the PSOMA applies the evolutionary searching mechanism of PSO, which is characterized by individual improvement, population cooperation, and competition to effectively perform exploration. On the other hand, the PSOMA utilizes several adaptive local searches to perform exploitation. First, to make PSO suitable for solving PFSSP, a ranked-order value rule based on random key representation is presented to convert the continuous position values of particles to job permutations. Second, to generate an initial swarm with certain quality and diversity, the famous Nawaz-Enscore-Ham (NEH) heuristic is incorporated into the initialization of population. Third, to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities, after the standard PSO-based searching operation, a new local search technique named NEH_1 insertion is probabilistically applied to some good particles selected by using a roulette wheel mechanism with a specified probability. Fourth, to enrich the searching behaviors and to avoid premature convergence, a simulated annealing (SA)-based local search with multiple different neighborhoods is designed and incorporated into the PSOMA. Meanwhile, an effective adaptive meta-Lamarckian learning strategy is employed to decide which neighborhood to be used in SA-based local search. Finally, to further enhance the exploitation ability, a pairwise-based local search is applied after the SA-based search. Simulation results based on benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the PSOMA. Additionally, the effects of some parameters on optimization performances are also discussed

title: Research on Architecture and Key Technology for Service-Oriented Workflow Performance Analysis
abstract: With the advent of SOA and Grid technology, the service has become the most important element of information systems. Because of the characteristic of service, the operation and performance management of workflow meet some new difficulties. Firstly a three-dimensional model of service is proposed. Then the characteristics of workflow in service-oriented environments are presented, based on which the workflow performance analysis architecture is described. As key technologies, workflow performance evaluation and analysis are discussed, including a multi-layer performance evaluation model and three kinds of performance analysis methods.

title: DE and NLP Based QPLS Algorithm
abstract: As a novel evolutionary computing technique, Differential Evolution (DE) has been considered to be an effective optimization method for complex optimization problems, and achieved many successful applications in engineering. In this paper, a new algorithm of Quadratic Partial Least Squares (QPLS) based on Nonlinear Programming (NLP) is presented. And DE is used to solve the NLP so as to calculate the optimal input weights and the parameters of inner relationship. The simulation results based on the soft measurement of diesel oil solidifying point on a real crude distillation unit demonstrate that the superiority of the proposed algorithm to linear PLS and QPLS which is based on Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) in terms of fitting accuracy and computational costs.

title: A New Performance Evaluation Model and AHP-Based Analysis Method in Service-Oriented Workflow
abstract: In service-oriented architecture, services and workflows are closely related so that the research on service-oriented workflow attracts the attention of academia. Because of the loosely-coupled, autonomic and dynamic nature of service, the operation and performance evaluation of workflow meet some challenges, such as how to judge the quality of service (QoS) and what is the relation between QoS and workflow performance. In this paper we are going to address these challenges. First the definition of service is proposed, and the characteristics and operation mechanism of service-oriented workflow are presented. Then a service-oriented workflow performance evaluation model is described which combines the performance of the business system and IT system. The key performance indicators (KPI) are also depicted with their formal representation. Finally the improved Analytic Hierarchy Process is brought forward to analyze the correlation between different KPIs and select services.

title: Constrained Nonlinear State Estimation - A Differential Evolution Based Moving Horizon Approach
abstract: A solution is proposed to estimate the states in the nonlinear discrete time system. Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) is used to obtain the approximated states by minimizing a criterion that is the Euclidean form of the difference between the estimated outputs and the measured ones over a finite time horizon. The differential evolution (DE) algorithm is incorporated into the implementation of MHE in order to solve the optimization problem which is presented as a nonlinear programming problem due to the constraints. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated in simulated systems that have appeared in the moving horizon estimation literature.

title: A Learning Process Using SVMs for Multi-agents Decision Classification
abstract: In order to resolve decision classification problem in multiple agents system, this paper first introduces the architecture of multiple agents system. It then proposes a support vector machines based assessment approach, which has the ability to learn the rules form previous assessment results from domain experts. Finally, the experiment are conducted on the artificially dataset to illustrate how the proposed works, and the results show the proposed method has effective learning ability for decision classification problems.

title: Intrusion detection system for high-speed network
abstract: The increasing network throughput challenges the current Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) to have compatible high-performance data processing. In this paper, we describe an in-depth research on the related techniques of high-performance network intrusion detection and an implementation of a Rule-based High-performance Network Intrusion Detection System (RHPNIDS) for high-speed networks. By integrating several performance optimizing methods, the performance of RHPNIDS is very impressive compared with the popular open source NIDS Snort.

title: Design and Implementation of Control System on Embedded Downloading Server Based on C/S Architecture
abstract: Based on Client-Server architecture, this paper proposes the design and implementation of system controlling embedded-Linux downloading server. The software architecture design of this system is composed of three parts: network layer, control layer, and application layer, which is modular and pluggable. The implementation also proved the feasibility, reliability and portability of this design.

title: Querying multiple sets of discovered rules
abstract: Rule mining is an important data mining task that has been applied to numerous real-world applications. Often a rule mining system generates a large number of rules and only a small subset of them is really useful in applications. Although there exist some systems allowing the user to query the discovered rules, they are less suitable for complex ad hoc querying of multiple data mining rulebases to retrieve interesting rules. In this paper, we propose a new powerful rule query language Rule-QL for querying multiple rulebases that is modeled after SQL and has rigorous theoretical foundations of a rule-based calculus. In particular, we first propose a rule-based calculus RC based on the first-order logic, and then present the language Rule-QL that is at least as expressive as the safe fragment of RC. We also propose a number of efficient query evaluation techniques for Rule-QL and test them experimentally on some representative queries to demonstrate the feasibility of Rule-QL.

title: Conceptual design: issues and challenges
abstract: Decisions made during conceptual design have signi®cant in ̄uence on the cost, performance, reliability, safety and environmental impact of a product. It has been estimated that design decisions account for more than 75% of ®nal product costs. It is, therefore, vital that designers have access to the right tools to support such design activities. In the early 1980s, researchers began to realize the impact of design decisions on downstream activities. As a result, different methodologies such as design for assembly, design for manufacturing and concurrent engineering, have been proposed. Software tools that implement these methodologies have also been developed. However, most of these tools are only applicable in the detailed design phase. Yet, even the highest standard of detailed design cannot compensate for a poor design concept formulated at the conceptual design phase. In spite of this, few CAD tools have been developed to support conceptual design activities. This is because knowledge of the design requirements and constraints during this early phase of a product's life cycle is usually imprecise and incomplete, making it dif®cult to utilize computer-based systems or prototypes. However, recent advances in ®elds such as fuzzy logic, computational geometry, constraints programming and so on have now made it possible for researchers to tackle some of the challenging issues in dealing with conceptual design activities. In this special issue, we have gathered together discussions on various aspects of conceptual design phase: from the capturing of the designer's intent, to modelling design constraints and solving them in an ef®cient manner, to verifying the correctness of the design.  Qin et al. begin this issue with the article aFrom online sketching to 2D and 3D geometry: a fuzzy knowledge based systemo in which they look at the interesting research problem of capturing the user's sketching intentions and automatically generating the corresponding geometric primitives. The motivation of this work comes from the fact that most designers still prefer to express their creative design ideas through 2D sketches. It is therefore important for a computer-aided conceptual design system to allow sketched input. Qin et al. built a prototype system that allows 2D sketched input, interprets the input sketch into more geometrically exact 2D vision objects and, when needed, projects the 2D objects into 3D models. The system receives the sketched input data through a sequence of mouse button presses, mouse motions and mouse button release events. After that, the system attempts to identify each curve segments and generate a precise 2D primitive for the identi®ed segment. For each pair of 2D primitives identi®ed, a 2D relationship (connectivity, parallelism or perpendicularity) is inferred by the system. As the 2D geometry (primitives 1 relationships) slowly accumulates, the system continually checks to see whether it can recognize a 3D object or feature. Upon recognition, the 3D object/ feature will be placed in 3D space and new features can be built upon previous ones. Latif Al Hakim et al. approach the problem from the concurrent engineering perspective. Traditionally, design is a serial activity whereby reliability, manufacturability, maintainability, safety and other requirements are considered sequentially. In recent years, in an effort to increase competitiveness and reduce design life cycle, the concept of concurrent engineering is introduced. Instead of performing design-related activities in series, they are performed simultaneously. This approach greatly increases the complexity of the design process due to the highly interactive nature of the various design tasks. To support design activities adequately in such an environment, Latif Al Hakim et al. propose the incorporation of reliability with functional perspectives at the conceptual design stage. They use graph theory to represent a product and the relationships between its components. A product's components are represented as the vertices of a graph, while the edges of the graph represent the ̄ow of energy between components. With this representation, it is easy to visualize energy ̄ow between components and thus trace any loss of functionality. In addition, this representation allows one easily to take into consideration various constraints such as cost for further design re®nement. The third paper in this special issue points out the need for a suitable conceptual design representation scheme for smooth integration with downstream applications of the product development process. Brunnetti and Golob propose a feature-based representation scheme for capturing product semantics handled in the conceptual design phase. They believe that any computer-aided design system should accomplish two major goals. The ®rst is to support the ̄ow of information without loss along the product development process, and the second is to assist designers in Computer-Aided Design 32 (2000) 849±850 COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN