Flocking of Multi-Vehicle Systems With A Leader
We study the coordinated motion of a group of vehicles with a leader based on nearest neighbor rules. The leader may be a special vehicle in the group or an external signal (virtual leader) to steer the vehicle group. The control law consists of two parts: a potential field force that makes the vehicles attract to each other and at the same time avoid collision in the group, and an alignment force that makes all vehicles' headings and speeds to converge respectively to common values. We assume that the interaction patterns are either fixed or switching based on the information topologies of the leader and member vehicles. Our approach is based on the Lyapunov theory and basic graph theory. We also consider the effect of noise on the collective dynamics of the group. Numerical simulations are worked out to illustrate the analytical results

title: Collective Behavior Analysis of a Class of Social Foraging Swarms
abstract: This paper considers an anisotropic swarm model that consists of a group of mobile autonomous agents with an attraction-repulsion function that can guarantee collision avoidance between agents and a Gaussian-type attractant/repellent nutrient profile. The swarm behavior is a result of a balance between inter-individual interplays as well as the interplays of the swarm individuals (agents) with their environment. It is proved that the members of a reciprocal swarm will aggregate and eventually form a cohesive cluster of finite size. It is shown that the swarm system is completely stable, that is, every solution converges to the equilibrium point set of the system. Moreover, it is also shown that all the swarm individuals will converge to more favorable areas of the Gaussian profile under certain conditions. The results of this paper provide further insight into the effect of the interaction pattern on self-organized motion for a Gaussian-type attractant/repellent nutrient profile in a swarm system.

title: Controllability of a Leader-Follower Dynamic Network with Interaction Time Delays
abstract: This paper studies the controllability of a leader-follower network of dynamic agents in the presence of communication delays. The network dynamics is governed by nearest neighbor rules over a fixed communication topology. The leader is a particular agent acting as an external input to steer the other member agents. We derive sufficient conditions of the controllability of the dynamic network and give an example to illustrate the main results.

title: Opinion Mining
abstract: Описанл процедуру формування інтегрального показника об’єкта згідно з відгуками користувачів під час застосування методів оцінювання опінії текстової інформації у web-документах. Запропоновано використання лінгвістичних змінних та застосування вагових коефіцієнтів для достовірнішого результату оцінювання емоційного забарвлення текстової інформації. Ключові слова: опінія, емоційне забарвлення, об’єкт, інтегральний показник, лінгвістична змінна, ваговий коефіцієнт.

title: Particle swarm optimization for function optimization in noisy environment
abstract: As a novel evolutionary searching technique, particle swarm optimization (PSO) has gained wide research and effective applications in the field of function optimization. However, to the best of our knowledge, most studies based on PSO are aimed at deterministic optimization problems. In this paper, the performance of PSO for function optimization in noisy environment is investigated, and an effective hybrid PSO approach named PSOOHT is proposed. In the PSOOHT, the population-based search mechanism of PSO is applied for well exploration and exploitation, and the optimal computing budget allocation (OCBA) technique is used to allocate limited sampling budgets to provide reliable evaluation and identification for good particles. Meanwhile, hypothesis test (HT) is also applied in the hybrid approach to reserve good particles and to maintain the diversity of the swarm as well. Numerical simulations based on several well-known function benchmarks with noise are carried out, and the effect of noise magnitude is also investigated as well. The results and comparisons demonstrate the superiority of PSOOHT in terms of searching quality and robustness.

title: Hybrid Algorithm Combining Ant Colony Algorithm with Genetic Algorithm for Continuous Domain
abstract: Ant colony algorithm is a kind of new heuristic biological modeling method which has the ability of parallel processing and global searching. By use of the properties of ant colony algorithm and genetic algorithm, the hybrid algorithm which adopts genetic algorithm to distribute the original pheromone is proposed to solve the continuous optimization problem. Several solutions are obtained using the ant colony algorithm through pheromone accumulation and renewal. Finally, by using crossover and mutation operation of genetic algorithm, some effective solutions are obtained. The results of experiments show better performances of the new algorithm based on six continuous test functions compared with the methods available in literature.

title: Consensus in Networks of Multiagents With Cooperation and Competition Via Stochastically Switching Topologies
abstract: In this brief, we provide some theoretical analysis of the consensus for networks of agents via stochastically switching topologies. We consider both discrete-time case and continuous-time case. The main contribution of this brief is that the underlying graph topology is more general in both cases than those appeared in previous papers. The weight matrix of the coupling graph is not assumed to be nonnegative or Metzler. That is, in the model discussed here, the off-diagonal entries of the weight matrix of the coupling graph may be negative. This means that sometimes, the coupling may not benefit, but may prevent the consensus of the coupled agents. In the continuous-time case, the switching time intervals also take a more general form of random variables than those appeared in previous works. We focus our study on such networks and give sufficient conditions that ensure almost sure consensus in both discrete-time case and continuous-time case. As applications, we give several corollaries under more specific assumptions, i.e., the switching can be some independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variable series or a Markov chain. Numerical examples are also provided in both discrete-time and continuous-time cases to demonstrate the validity of our theoretical results.

title: BitTube: Case Study of a Web-Based Peer-Assisted Video-on-Demand System
abstract: Recent theoretical and simulation-based studies have confirmed the tremendous benefit of peer-to-peer (P2P)communication at reducing the cost of running a VoD service.To date, very limited effort has been paid to validate the concept of peer-assisted VoD service, especially in terms of system implementation and service deployment. In this paper, we present the case study of a peer-assisted video-on-demand (VoD) system. We designed and developed Bit-Tube, a BitTorrent-compliant VoD system. By combining client/server and P2P downloading, it supports seamless transition across the spectrum from pure client-server mode to BitTorrent mode. Within this framework, we experiment with a series of piece picking policies to enhance BitTubepsilas support to video streaming and promote locality-aware P2P downloading. We evaluate our system over PlanetLab,which hosts the user-side component of the BitTube system and emulates the global-scale user requests to the VoD service.