Paris Dauphine University

About: Paris Dauphine University is a education organization based out in Paris, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Approximation algorithm. The organization has 1766 authors who have published 6909 publications receiving 162747 citations. The organization is also known as: Paris Dauphine & Dauphine.

An Extended Multi-Agent Negotiation Protocol

Abstract: This article presents a task allocation protocol that is efficient in time and tolerates crash failures in multi-agent systems. The protocol is an extension of the negotiation protocol defined by Smith and Davis [25, 26] for task allocation. Our extension of the Contract Net Protocol (1) enables an agent to manage several negotiation processes in parallel; (2) optimizes the length of the negotiation processes among agents; (3) reduces the contractors' decommitment situations; (4) enables the detection of failures of an agent participating in a negotiation process and prevents a negotiation process with blocked agents.

ELECTRE Methods: Main Features and Recent Developments

Abstract: We present main characteristics of ELECTRE family methods, designed for multiple criteria decision aiding. These methods use as a preference model an outranking relation in the set of actions – it is constructed in result of concordance and non-discordance tests involving a specific input preference information. After a brief description of the constructivist conception in which the ELECTRE methods are inserted, we present the main features of these methods. We discuss such characteristic features as: the possibility of taking into account positive and negative reasons in the modeling of preferences, without any need for recoding the data; using of thresholds for taking into account the imperfect knowledge of data; the absence of systematic compensation between “gains” and “losses”. The main weaknesses are also presented. Then, some aspects related to new developments are outlined. These are related to some new methodological developments, new procedures, axiomatic analysis, software tools, and several other aspects. The chapter ends with conclusions.

Solutions of superlinear elliptic equations and their morse indices

Abstract: We consider here solutions of semilinear second-order elliptic equations with superlinear nonlinearities. And we present some relationships between their Morse Indices and some qualitative properties. In particular we show that for, “uo;subcritical” nonlinearities, bounds on solutions are equivalent to bounds on their Morse indices.

Division in Escherichia coli is triggered by a size-sensing rather than a timing mechanism.

Abstract: Background Many organisms coordinate cell growth and division through size control mechanisms: cells must reach a critical size to trigger a cell cycle event. Bacterial division is often assumed to be controlled in this way, but experimental evidence to support this assumption is still lacking. Theoretical arguments show that size control is required to maintain size homeostasis in the case of exponential growth of individual cells. Nevertheless, if the growth law deviates slightly from exponential for very small cells, homeostasis can be maintained with a simple 'timer' triggering division. Therefore, deciding whether division control in bacteria relies on a 'timer' or 'sizer' mechanism requires quantitative comparisons between models and data. Results The timer and sizer hypotheses find a natural expression in models based on partial differential equations. Here we test these models with recent data on single-cell growth of Escherichia coli. We demonstrate that a size-independent timer mechanism for division control, though theoretically possible, is quantitatively incompatible with the data and extremely sensitive to slight variations in the growth law. In contrast, a sizer model is robust and fits the data well. In addition, we tested the effect of variability in individual growth rates and noise in septum positioning and found that size control is robust to this phenotypic noise. Conclusions Confrontations between cell cycle models and data usually suffer from a lack of high-quality data and suitable statistical estimation techniques. Here we overcome these limitations by using high precision measurements of tens of thousands of single bacterial cells combined with recent statistical inference methods to estimate the division rate within the models. We therefore provide the first precise quantitative assessment of different cell cycle models.