IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics

New ways are becoming available for analyzing our social systems. These permit the design of revised policies to improve the behavior of the systems within which we live. Industrial dynamics relates system structure to behavior. Industrial dynamics belongs to the same general subject area as feedback systems, servomechanisms theory, and cybernetics. Industrial dynamics is the study of how the feed... View full abstract»

The purpose is to illustrate the applicability of the approach and the techniques of systems engineering to certain urban problems. Systems engineering can be an effective tool in the design and operation of organizations to accomplish such urban activities as police scheduling, waste disposal, river purification, fire house location, etc. The relatively unploughed ground of applying systems engin... View full abstract»

The purpose of the model presented is to maximize the social profitability of a governmental agency by determining prices and production levels of two different sources of water. This maximization is performed subject to both sociopolitical and physical constraints. The nonlinear stochastic model developed is reduced to a linear stochastic model of one decision variable. Also presented are the res... View full abstract»

An analytical approach to several operational problems of urban police departments is introduced. In particular, the focus is on urban police patrol forces and the two important activities of a patrol car (or patrol unit) 1) answering a call for police service, 2) performing crime preventive patrol. After reviewing the traditional allocation method, a patrol travel time model and a preventive patr... View full abstract»

A simulation model designed to compare different policies for locating, relocating, and dispatching fire-fighting units is described. Issues treated include: the use of internal measures of performance as proxies for global ones; the use of analytical models for various subproblems to yield policies to be tested; the handling of loss of life and other important but rare events. The SIMSCRIPT 1.5 s... View full abstract»

The high cost of public education has stimulated interest in applying the techniques of operations research and systems analysis to the management of schools. These applications are generally intended to promote greater efficiency in school operations and insure more effective use of educational resources. Due to the sociopolitical nature of public elementary and secondary educational institutions... View full abstract»

Some of the basic elements affecting the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of health programs for the urban poor are developed. The Medicaid program is examined as an example of recent Federal efforts to upgrade the health status of indigent population of the United States. The rapidly rising costs of medical care and the unexpectedly high costs of Medicaid serve to reemphasize the need ... View full abstract»

The results of a total system analysis leading to the optimal design of an automotive exhaust air pollution control device are presented. The purpose is to demonstrate a capability for effectively optimizing design parameters of a subsystem in an operating environment which are subject to three optimality criteria: minimum cost for fixed performance; maximum effectiveness (emission reduction) per ... View full abstract»

An approach to water quality control is presented for the case where there could be significant interaction of wastes in a stream. In most previous studies, a single pollutant was considered and a single related water quality parameter was used as a constraint. In highly developed river basins, it is reasonable to expect more than one important pollutant. If they interact in the stream, traditiona... View full abstract»

A procedure for the design of traffic signal control policies which results in minimal average delay and queue length is presented. The procedure is applicable to preset and sampled data controllers. The optimal policy is computed from measurements of the average demand in each flow direction during some interval (10 minutes to several hours). In many cases, substantial improvements over classical... View full abstract»

A digital simulation of the basic oxygen steel furnace was previously developed, and its output was compared with the available data taken from the literature. The output concentrations were within 10 percent of the literature data, while the simulated temperature was within 0.5 percent. The simulation is used as an off-line model of the process to design an endpoint control system which makes use... View full abstract»

A theory of visual pattern perception is proposed, which is intended to explain first how patterns are learned or committed to memory, second how these patterns are recognized when subsequently encountered, and third how the patterns are recognized under unfavorable real-world conditions, for example, when they are distorted, enlarged, or rotated, or are viewed along with other patterns in a clutt... View full abstract»

A method is presented for defining an information measure for deterministic sequences. This is done by considering a sequence as a non-Markovian sample space. The correspondence between redundancy, as defined by this information measure, and measured perception ability is considered. View full abstract»

A classifier which, in general, implements a nonlinear decision boundary is shown to be equivalent to a linear discriminant function when the measurements are binary valued; its relation to the Bayes classifier is derived. The classifier requires less computation than a similar one based on the Euclidean distance and can perform equally well. View full abstract»