Post-harvest seedcoat darkening is a major problem in many pulses, including common bean (</i>Phaseolus vulgaris</i> L.). In some bean market classes, such as pinto, beans that have a darkened seedcoat are discounted in the market place as it is assumed that the beans are old and will be hard-to-cook (HTC). Pinto genotypes that darken more slowly than conventional pinto beans would be more desirable and have been identified in the bean breeding program at the University of Saskatchewan. <p>To study the slow-darkening trait, a quick, reliable, and inexpensive screening method that would not affect seed germination would be beneficial. Three potential protocols to accelerate seedcoat darkening were examined. The greenhouse protocol was conducted in the greenhouse by placing the bean seeds in polybags with a 1 cm2 piece of moistened felt. For the UV light protocol, bean seeds were placed 10 cm below an UV lamp which had a wavelength of 254 nm. For the cabinet protocol, bean seeds were placed in a cabinet set at 30¢ªC, 80% relative humidity, and full fluorescent lights. Color measurements were taken routinely using a Hunter Lab colorimeter. All three methods were successful in distinguishing darkening beans from slow-darkening beans although the UV light protocol was considered to be superior to the greenhouse and cabinet protocol as the UV light protocol was quick, consistent over years, and the most economical. Unlike the greenhouse and the cabinet protocols, the UV light protocol did not affect seed germination following accelerated darkening. <p>The stability of the slow-darkening trait was further investigated in genotype by environment (g x e) studies across different indoor and outdoor environments. In the g x e study across different field environments, it was found that prior to accelerated seedcoat darkening the g x e interaction was significant. Following accelerated seedcoat darkening, environment and genotype were both significant and g x e was not. The slow-darkening genotypes had lighter seedcoats than the darkening genotypes and those field sites that had more favorable weather had lighter seedcoats. For the g x e study across indoor and outdoor environments, when the genotypes were split into either slow-darkening or darkening, the g x e interaction was not significant and the slow-darkening genotypes had lighter seedcoats. <p>Genetic control of the slow darkening trait was determined. For crosses between slow-darkening genotypes and CDC Pintium, the F2 populations segregated 3 darkening : 1 slow-darkening with distinct bimodal distribution. This indicated that seedcoat darkening was controlled by a single gene and darkening was dominant over slow-darkening. For both slow-darkening by slow-darkening crosses, the F2 populations¡¯ L* values were unimodal, normal distributions, indicating there may be modifying genes for the slow-darkening trait.

Current research in multi-agent systems (MAS) has advanced to the development of open MAS, which are characterized by the heterogeneity of agents, free exit/entry and decentralized control. Conflicts of interest among agents are inevitable, and hence automated negotiation to resolve them is one of the promising solutions. This thesis studies three modifications on alternating-offer bargaining protocols for automated negotiation in open MAS. The long-term goal of this research is to design negotiation protocols which can be easily used by intelligent agents in accommodating their need in resolving their conflicts. In particular, we propose three modifications: allowing non-monotonic offers during the bargaining (non-monotonic-offers bargaining protocol), allowing strategic delay (delay-based bargaining protocol), and allowing strategic ignorance to augment argumentation when the bargaining comprises argumentation (ignorance-based argumentation-based negotiation protocol). <p>Utility theory and decision-theoretic approaches are used in the theoretical analysis part, with an aim to prove the benefit of these three modifications in negotiation among myopic agents under uncertainty. Empirical studies by means of computer simulation are conducted in analyzing the cost and benefit of these modifications. Social agents, who use common human bargaining strategies, are the subjects of the simulation. <p>In general, we assume that agents are bounded rational with various degrees of belief and trust toward their opponents. In particular in the study of the non-monotonic-offers bargaining protocol, we assume that our agents have diminishing surplus. We further assume that our agents have increasing surplus in the study of delay-based bargaining protocol. And in the study of ignorance-based argumentation-based negotiation protocol, we assume that agents may have different knowledge and use different ontologies and reasoning engines. <p>Through theoretical analysis under various settings, we show the benefit of allowing these modifications in terms of agents expected surplus. And through simulation, we show the benefit of allowing these modifications in terms of social welfare (total surplus). Several implementation issues are then discussed, and their potential solutions in terms of some additional policies are proposed. Finally, we also suggest some future work which can potentially improve the reliability of these modifications.

During the underwater vehicle R&D process, a crucial task in the beginning phase is to decide the specifications of sensors and actuators. The designers need to make decisions if an off-the-shelf product will meet the requirement, or more efforts should be devoted to the development of a component. The communication format undertaken between the controller and the subsystems is another important design issue worth of close attention. Once these specifications are settled, it will be very troublesome to change them afterwards in case a design flaw is discovered. It will be even worse if the problems are found after the prototype vehicle is constructed. In order to ensure the flexibility and shorten the development time, this paper proposes an architecture for general-purpose low level controller suitable for underwater vehicles. We suggest using the idea of ¡§tiers¡¨ to construct a vehicle controller with multiple layers. Generally speaking, there are many different paths of information flow in a vehicle control system. It can be high-level tier and abstractive intention of the human operator interpreted by the man-machine interface; or the mid-level tier control commands to maneuver the vehicle to a specific direction; down to the low -level tier as the raw commands fed to the thrusters. The performance and the reliability of the system deeply depend on the flow of these information and commands. High- and mid-level tiers information can be modeled mathematically, but the low-level tier is product-dependent. In other words, once a new sensor or actuator is installed, the control software related to these components need to be revised accordingly. The modification of the software might exist at multiple places if the structure is not organized as tiers. In order to maintain full flexibility of the vehicle controller structure throughout the R&D period, the high- and mid-level will be implemented in the man-machine interface for ROV case, and in the mission planner in the AUV case. The low-level tier is implemented in the onboard computer. The onboard low-level controller covers a variety of communication format of physical ports, such as serial line, D/A, A/D, D/IO and PWM. Port setting parameters, such baud-rate or DA range, can be specified remotely on the surface. The physical connecting ports of the sensors can be changed freely without rewiring or reprogramming. Taking the stability of the controller as the top priority, we used DOS operating system as the platform to implement our concepts. DOS has been in the market for more than two decades, but it has the merits of fast in booting, highly stable, efficient in computation. We use its timer interrupt service INT 0X1C to construct a realtime thread to poll the readiness of sensory channels, and uploads the data to the surface via a channel-driven packet. The packets delivered to the surface are split into channels and reconstructed back to their original raw data format. The other necessary service routines, such as DA, AD and DIO, are also embedded inside this thread for its promptitude. We constructed an experimental platform with this low-level controller to verify if the vehicle alitude control can be accurate enough as the carrier of the Seafloor Laser Scanner developed by our lab. Prior to the experiments, issues, such as whether the bouyancy of the system is pro or con for driving the vechile, were studied with Simulink. The poorness of altitude control caused by the deadzone effect of the thruster failed to be duplicated as in the simulation, while the alitude control gave a tracking error within ¡Ó 5cm.

The economic development, environmental sustainability and energy security stay on the top of government agenda, which guarantee the citizen¡¦s standards of living . EU's indigenous energy production is depleting, and each states has different priorities. The European Union push new European energy policies improving security of energy supply ,which are aiming at reducing the risks being dependent on external supply. Those new european energy policies transform Europe into a highly energy efficiency and low CO2 economy,creating an internal energy market and diversifying energy supplies. The EU¡¦s internal policies include enhancing powers and independence of regulatory authorities at Community level, improving the integrated and flexible energy networks,establishing adequate minimum security of gas supply standards and emergency measures and executing the Action Plan for energy efficiency. The EU¡¦s external policies include enhancing energy partnership and continuing energy dialogue with Russia, Central Asia and Mediterranean area, improving investment and growth, developing common trade,transit and environment rules, building the energy supply chain and diversifying energy supplies. In this thesis the security of EU¡¦s energy supply will be examined by the perspective of neo-functionalism.

Data integrity and privacy are the two most important security requirements in wireless communication. Most mechanisms rely on pre-share key data encryption to prevent unauthorized users from accessing confidential information. However, a fixed secret key is vulnerable to cracking by capturing sufficient packets or launching a dictionary attack. In this research, a dynamic re-keying encryption protocol was developed to enhance the security protection for IEEE 802.11 and hybrid wireless network. This protocol automatically updates the secret key during the end-to-end transmission between wireless devices to protect the network and the communication privacy. In addition, security analyses are given to verify the protection of this protocol. Experiment results also validate that the dynamic encryption approach can perform as efficiently as other security architectures while providing an additional layer of data protection.

Anycast is a new communication service defined in IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) [6]. An anycast message is the one that should be delivered to the 'nearest' member in a group of designated recipients. The ¡¥nearest¡¦ is not always the ¡¥best¡¦ member. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol for anycast message. It is composed of two subprotocols: the routing table establishment subprotocol and the packet forwarding subprotocol. In the routing table establishment subprotocol, we propose a mininum delay path method (MDP). We get a minimum delay path from router to destination by MDP. In the packet forwarding protocol, we propose a minimum delay and load balancing method (MDLB). We dispatch traffic load to a server with minimum delay and light load by MDLB. The performance has demonstrated the benefits of MDP and MDLB in reducing end-to-end delay and increasing throughput of network.

Since Kyoto Protocol took effect on Feb.16, 2005, Greenhouse gas emission reduction and Energy tax levy become a hot topic immediately. In addition, an action plan has been raised at the second National Energy Conference in 2005, for promoting ESCOs (Energy Service Companies) to improve energy efficiency and achieve energy conservation by conducting Energy Saving Performance Contract(ESPC). Hopefully these results will attain substantial reduction of carbon dioxide emission goals. International ESCO development model involves inter-industry integration, it faces many barriers¡Asuch as financing, insurance, measurement and verification, risk guarantee, tax exemption, small-scale market---etc. The financing barriers are the most importment problem in the development of ESCOs. In the study, Yin case studies are used to collect and analyze national barrier factors in financing. feasible financing mechanisms were explored in this study for ESCO , by participating in TAESCO¡¦s activities and interviewing with key persons in energy service companies, financial institutions and ESCO industry experts. The achievements of this study are¡G(1)ESCO industry prospects is optimistic conservative.(2)The business models have different opinions for localized development.(3)The key barrier factors are consistent with the types of barriers reported in the literatures on ESCO industry in other countries.(4)The industry has a few successful energy saving projects only, and then general business loans and own funds are the main way in ESCO financing.(5)The biggest gap of the financing with financial institutions is that banks do not have experience in ESCO industry.(6)There are three feasible financing mechanisms, which can be promoted on national ESCO industry. Finally, implementation of the results proposed three appropriate localization financing mechanisms(ESCO Credit Guarantee, Firefly Project Fund, Development Fund or Project Best Lending) will be worthy to explore empirically in the future.

STANAG 5066 Edition 2 is a node-to-node protocol developed by NATO in order to communicate via HF media. IP integration is made to be able to spread the use of STANAG 5066 protocol. However, this integration made the communication much slower which is already slow. In order to get faster the speed and communicate within single-frequency multi-node network, HFTRP, which is a derivative of WTRP, is developed. This protocol is in two parts, first is a message design for management tokens exchanged by communicating nodes, and second is the algorithms used to create, maintain, and repair the ring of nodes in the network. Scope of this thesis is to find out a faster ring setup, growing procedure and to implement. Beside, finding optimum values of tuning parameters for HFTRP is also in the scope of this thesis.

In recent years, many researchers investigated a new class of computer architecture, called intelligent memory (IRAM), to reduce the performance gap between the CPU and memory. In order to increase the flexibility of designing parallel applications, we develop the communication mechanisms for FlexRAM, one of the IRAM architectures. The communication protocol is called CPFR (Communication Protocol for FlexRAM). For the reason of lacking whole communication mechanism in the original FlexRAM architecture, we construct CPFR by using the features of shared-memory and the notification primitive centrally controlled by the main memory processor (P.Mem). In addition, we provide a uniform programming interface in CPFR for the programmers. An example is also used to demonstrate the usage of our communication protocol in detail.

ABSTRACT Recently, wireless terminal users that want to a gain various information from www have been increased rapidly. Already-existing HTML applications can be converted into WML (Wireless Markup Language) applications for user on WAP (Wireless application Protocol) enabled devices[10], yet this process is not as simple as the alteration of the markup tags. This paper investigates the problems associated with the conversion process by examining the conversion of a functional information system that would be of benefit to its users when access from remote locations is required. This paper derails a number of problems discovered with the conversion of complex HTML[5] documents into simplified WML documents[4]. The major problems of displaying tabulated data, hyperlinks, navigational aids and user input are discussed, and described with possible solutions presented. The paper concludes by raising the issue of ¡¥intelligent¡¦ automated HTML-to-WML conversion, a topic for future research.