Type-WA*: Using Exploration in Bounded Suboptimal Planning

Previous work on satisficing planning using greedy best-first search (GBFS) has shown that non-greedy, randomized exploration can help escape uninformative heuristic regions and solve hard problems faster. Despite their success when used with GBFS, such exploration techniques cannot be directly applied to bounded suboptimal algorithms like Weighted A* (WA*) without losing the solution-quality guarantees. In this work, we present Type-WA*, a novel bounded suboptimal planning algorithm that augments WA* with type-based exploration while still satisfying WA*'s theoretical solution-quality guarantee. Our empirical analysis shows that Type-WA* significantly increases the number of solved problems, when used in conjunction with each of three popular heuristics. Our analysis also provides insight into the runtime vs. solution cost trade-off.

LA TRADITION – VECTEUR IMPORTANT DE PROMOTION ET GAGE DE QUALITÉ. LE CAS DES PRODUITS ROUMAINS DU TERROIR (TRADITION – IMPORTANT PROMOTION AND QUALITY GUARANTEE VECTOR. THE CASE OF TRADITIONAL ROMANIAN PRODUCTS)

This paper illustrates some of the ways in which producers and traders of traditional Romanian products in the agri-food sector manage to promote their products on the international market using digital media. They used to be present at international trade fairs and exhibitions or in the traditional media. In recent years and especially during the Covid pandemic19, promotion has moved online, on enterprise websites, on social networks and on eCommerce platforms. Using the concepts of discourse analysis, we will show that the discourse promoting regional specialties contains references to tradition – as a guarantee of authenticity, originality, and value of the product, to health – being genuine products made with natural ingredients, in small factories or even in peasant households, with respect for quality and manufacturing stages – the most well-known Romanian products already having the status of a brand with a protected geographical indication. It is a discourse about exceptional products. Based on recipes that are about 200 years old, perfecting the manufacturing processes and raising the tradition to the rank of art, the producers manage to offer specialties that give any meal refinement, and even luxury. Foreign tourists taste these products for the first time during the holidays spent in the agrotourism pensions in Romania, and then they look for them in the Romanian stores in their countries or on the eCommerce sites.

Goods Quality Guarantee and Goods Quality Assurance: The Correlation and Demarcation Issue

In this paper, we study the correlation between legal doctrines of merchantability warranty of goods and assurances of quality of goods as a particular case of assurances of circumstances. The possible similarities, but especially differences, have been pointed out. The position of necessity of their identification and differentiation has been presented. The paper also describes the difference between the legal consequences of a breach of the merchantability warranty and the quality assurance as well as some other differences in the legal regulation arising from their correlation.

Nonconvex constrained optimization by a filtering branch and bound

A major difficulty in optimization with nonconvex constraints is to find feasible solutions. As simple examples show, the $$\alpha $$ α BB-algorithm for single-objective optimization may fail to compute feasible solutions even though this algorithm is a popular method in global optimization. In this work, we introduce a filtering approach motivated by a multiobjective reformulation of the constrained optimization problem. Moreover, the multiobjective reformulation enables to identify the trade-off between constraint satisfaction and objective value which is also reflected in the quality guarantee. Numerical tests validate that we indeed can find feasible and often optimal solutions where the classical single-objective $$\alpha $$ α BB method fails, i.e., it terminates without ever finding a feasible solution.