Containment (computer programming)

Abstract: On March 29, 2004, 11 undergraduate students who organized a sit-in support of adjunct faculty and service employee workers at The George Washington University (GW) were arrested by Washington, DC police as a result of a university complaint for trespassing in the Marvin Center, the designated student center. Considering the arrest of the eleven students provides a moment in which to re-conceptualize the corporate university. Most of the students who were arrested were members of the Progressive Student Union (PSU). Over the past few years this organization has studied workers and working conditions on the GW campus. Among others, students in PSU are in contact with parking lot workers in GW garages, housekeepers who clean GW dorm rooms, unionized cafeteria workers on campus, and GW part-time faculty who are involved in an attempt to unionize. The PSU-initiated sit-in was a response to labor abuses observed by students throughout the year, as well as their feeling that GW failed to respond to student objections to these labor abuses. In the fall of the 2003-2004 academic year, it was reported that theAramark Company, contracted by GW to operate campus food services, dismissed approximately 28 workers. The workers—many of whom the PSU students know personally—were replaced with non-unionized temporary employees. In addition, several of the food stalls in the cafeteria were outsourced to non-unionized contractors. At the same time, PSU students learned from parking workers about the anti-union efforts of their employer, Colonial Parking Company. According to Holly Smith, a member of the PSU, PSU efforts to develop a conversation with the GW administration about labor abuses were met

Abstract: This article is concerned with the problem of the containment control with respect to continuous-time semi-Markovian multiagent systems with semi-Markovian switching topologies. Two kinds of classical control schemes, which are dynamic containment control and static containment control schemes, are utilized to address the proposed synthesis problem. Based on the linear matrix inequality (LMI) method, the dynamic containment controller and static containment controller are designed to plunge into the studied semi-Markovian multiagent systems, respectively. Moreover, the random switching topologies with the semi-Markovian process, the partly unknown transition rates, and the generally uncertain transition rates are taken into account, which can be applicable to more practical situations. Finally, the simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results.

Abstract: The management of semistructured data has recently rccoivcd significant attention because of the need of several applications to model and query large volumes of irregular data. This paper considers the problem of query containment for a query language over semistructured data, STRUQLO, that contains the essential feature common to all such languages, namely the ability to specify regular path expressions over the data. We show hcrc that containment of STRUQLO queries is decidable. First, we give a semantic criterion for STRUQLO query containment: WC show that it suffices to check containment on only finitely many canonical databases. Second, we give a syntactic criteria for query containment, based on a notion of query mappings, which extends containment mappings for conjunctive queries. Third, wc consider a certain fragment of STRUQLO, obtained by imposing restrictions on the regular path expressions, and show that query containment for this fragment of STRUQLO is NP complete.