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Abstract: "Design databases store information relevant to the design of engineered systems, such as aircrafts, software systems, automobiles, etc. Concurrent design allows several designers to access the design databases concurrently while cooperating on a design effort and maintaining the consistency of the data items. Concurrency control in traditional databases has been achieved by using some version of a transaction model with serializability as the main correctness criterion. However, serializability is not a suitable criterion for design databases because: (1) individual design transactions can be of long duration, making it undesirable to grant locks, and (2) aborted transactions involve losing the work of some designer. Recent approaches have addressed the above issues by weakening the correctness criteria for transactions. The protocol to ensure correctness of such transactions requires a validation phase before transactions are actually carried out. However, current protocols for transaction validation are non-optimal in the level of concurrency achieved. In this paper, we present a negotiation-based protocol to identify design change conflicts in the transaction validation phase. Our protocol will allow for more concurrency than the protocols suggested in the literature. The protocol is being implemented in a software engineering environment, and is illustrated in this paper with the use of a simple programming example."

Problem definition: Revenue management in railways distinguishes itself from that in traditional sectors such as airline, hotel, and fashion retail, in several important ways: (i) Capacity is substantially more flexible, in the sense that changes to the capacity of a train can often be made throughout the sales horizon. Consequently, the joint optimization of prices and capacity assumes genuine importance. (ii) Capacity can only be added in discrete "chunks", i.e., coaches. (iii) Passengers with unreserved tickets can travel in any of the multiple trains available during the day. Further, passengers in unreserved coaches are allowed to travel by standing, thus giving rise to the need to manage congestion. Motivated by our work with a major railway company in Japan, we analyze the problem of jointly optimizing pricing and capacity - this problem is a more-general version of the canonical multiproduct dynamic-pricing problem.Methodology/Results: Our analysis yields four asymptotically optimal policies. From the viewpoint of the pricing decisions, our policies can be classified into two types - static and dynamic. With respect to the timing of the capacity decisions, our policies are again of two types - fixed capacity and flexible capacity. We also establish the convergence rates of these policies: when demand and supply are scaled by a factor $ kappa$, the optimality gaps of the static policies scale proportional to $ sqrt{ kappa}$, and those of the dynamic policies scale proportional to $ log kappa$. We numerically illustrate the attractive performance of our policies on a test-suite of instances based on real-world operations of the high-speed “Shinkansen” trains in Japan.Managerial implications: Our work provides railway administrators with simple and effective policies for pricing, capacity, and congestion management. Our policies cater to different contingencies that decision-makers may face in practice: the need for static or dynamic prices, and for fixed or flexible capacity.

In our second case, an RC tree which is driven by at least one source has leaky capacitors. We show how to calculate delays for such trees by a linear time algorithm.

We consider the problem of covering simple orthogonal polygons with star polygons. A star polygon contains a point p, such that for every point q in the star polygon, there is an orthogonally convex polygon containing p and q.