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This research proposes and evaluates hypotheses about patterns of communication in a multi‐party, multi‐issue negotiation. Data were from 36 four‐person groups. We found that the majority of groups initiated negotiations with a distributive phase and ended with an integrative phase—strong support for Morley and Stephenson's (1979) rational model of negotiation. We identified transitions between both strategic orientations (integration, distribution) and strategic functions (action, information), but found that the first transition was more likely to result in a change of orientation than of function and that negotiators were more likely to change either orientation or function (single transition) than to change both aspects of the negotiation simultaneously (double transition). Finally, we determined that negotiators used process and closure strategies to interrupt distributive phases and redirect negotiations to an integrative phase.

XML has spread beyond the computer science fields and reached other areas such as, e‐commerce, identification, information storage, instant messaging and others. Data communicated over these domains are now mainly based on XML. Thus, allowing non‐expert programmers to manipulate and control their XML data is essential. The purpose of this paper is to present an XA2C framework intended for both non‐expert and expert programmers and provide them with means to write/draw their XML data manipulation operations.

In the literature, this issue has been dealt with from two perspectives: first, XML alteration/adaptation techniques requiring a certain level of expertise to be implemented and are not unified yet; and second, Mashups, which are not formally defined yet and are not specific to XML data, and XML‐oriented visual languages are based on structural transformations and data extraction mainly and do not allow XML textual data manipulations. The paper discusses existing approaches and the XA2C framework is presented.

The framework is defined based on the dataflow paradigm (visual diagram compositions) while taking advantage of both Mashups and XML‐oriented visual languages by defining a well‐founded modular architecture and an XML‐oriented visual functional composition language based on colored petri nets allowing functional compositions. The framework takes advantage of existing XML alteration/adaptation techniques by defining them as XML‐oriented manipulation functions. A prototype called XA2C is developed and presented here for testing and validating the authors' approach.

This paper presents a detailed description of an XML‐oriented manipulation framework implementing the XML‐oriented composition definition language.

The purpose of this paper is the investigation of a new coordinated switching strategy to improve the transient performance of a fuel cell (FC)- supercapacitor (SC) electric vehicle. The proposed switching strategy protects FCs from large currents drawn during abrupt power variations. Furthermore, it compensates the poor FC transient response and suppresses the transient ripples occurring during power source switching instants.

Coordinated power source switching is achieved using three different transition functions. Vehicle model is fractioned into computational and console subsystems for its simulation using real time (RT) LAB simulator. Blocs containing coordination switching strategy, power sources models and their power electronics interface are placed in the computational subsystem that will be executed, in RT, on one of real time laboratory simulator central processing unit cores.

Coordination switching strategy resulted in reducing transient power ripples by 90% and direct current (DC) bus voltage fluctuations by 50%. Switching through transition functions compensated the difference between FC and SC transient responses responsible for transient power ripples. Among the three proposed transition functions, linear transition function resulted in the best transient performances.

The proposed coordinated switching strategy allows the control of the switching period duration. Furthermore, it enables the choice of adequate transition functions that fit the dynamics of power sources undergoing transition. Also, the proposed switching technique is simple and does not require the knowledge of system parameters or the complex control models.

Our aim is to catalog how the functional behaviors that leaders engage in should change over time based on the needs of the team – thereby presenting a functional view of team leadership over time.

A critical review of the literature on team leadership, team development, and teams was conducted. This information was critically analyzed and integrated to produce a framework serving to depict how team needs change over time, and based on this, highlight the leadership behaviors which should be most critical at particular points in time. Based on the limited amount of literature that explicitly focused on team leadership over time, a series of propositions which flow from the framework are also put forth.

Great strides have been made in understanding team leadership; however, little work was uncovered that directly focused on how leadership dynamics change over time within the context of the team. Leveraging the limited work that existed, we developed a framework (and propositions) that serves to delineate how team leadership functions change over time. In doing so, we have integrated work delineating leadership functions within transition and action phases of team task cycles along with that highlighting how the role of the leader may vary based on team developmental needs.

The originality of this chapter lies in its using a functional approach to leadership to argue how the efficacy of particular leadership functions change over time based on team task cycles and development needs. This, in turn, can be used to focus training efforts.

Standard economic theory predicts that any increase in public spending is accompanied by a rise in inflation in an economy. This paper presents empirical proof that prices do not always rise with an increase in public expenditure but only up to a certain threshold level. The primary aim of this paper is to unearth the government size-inflation nexus in India for the period from 1971 to 2019.

The logistic STAR (smooth transition autoregression) model is employed to unravel the government size-inflation nexus for the Indian economy from a non-linear perspective.

The finding of our study confirm the non-linear relationship between the size of the government and inflation in India. The estimated threshold level for government size is precisely found to be 9.27%. The size of the government exerts a negative influence on inflation until it reaches the optimal or threshold level. Any further increase in the size of government beyond this threshold level would result in a rise in inflation.

The findings have implications for the conduct of fiscal policy. Policymakers can increase government spending in a regime of small government size without having any inflationary impacts by generating revenues from taxes and other sources instead of relying much on the central bank. In the regime of a large-sized government, adhering strictly to the discipline in the conduct of fiscal and monetary policies would help curb inflation and enhance growth synchronously, hence alleviating any loss of welfare.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is an attempt to revisit the government size-inflation nexus in India from a non-linear perspective using the Smooth Transition Autoregression (STAR) model for the first time.

This paper deals with real‐time control of urban traffic with an emphasis on public transportation systems. The main objective is the regulation of traffic after the occurrence of disturbances. In a few words, the problem is to find a feasible schedule for some vehicles of some lines subject to certain constraints in order to design a decision support system (DSS) that detects, analyses and resolves disturbances.

This work is achieved in cooperation with a public transport company called SEMURVAL. It consists of developing a DSS for the future transportation network of Valenciennes (city in the north of France). As a consequence, regulators of traffic have to treat a new lot of information and it becomes necessary to assist them in order to keep up with demands and to come up to passengers' expectations and hopes.

From the case study finds that the solution proposed assures that arrival times of vehicles are more regular.

The solution proposed presents a good combination of scheduling decisions permitting the good regulation of traffic.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the level of natural gas consumption that can be adjudged as capable of improving the growth of the Nigerian economy, to investigate whether natural gas consumption is at optimal level in Nigeria and to examine the nature and rate to which natural gas consumption affects economic growth in Nigeria at low and high regimes.

The tool used to achieve the objectives of the paper is the smooth transition regression (STR) model.

The findings of the paper are that the relationship between natural gas consumption and economic growth in Nigeria is asymmetric, where the natural gas consumption threshold value in the country is 9085.36 standard cubic meters, whereas the level of its consumption in the country is below the optimal level. Further, in both low and high regimes, natural gas consumption has been found to have a positive and significant impact on economic growth in Nigeria.

The policy implication of the paper is that natural gas consumption in Nigeria should not be less than 9085.36 standard cubic meters and the country should intensify efforts to increase the level of natural gas consumption, as it is below the optimal level and its consumption bolsters the growth of Nigerian economy.

What is new in this paper is its ability to use the STR model. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, such methodology has not been adopted before in such a relation.

This paper contains a generalization of the existing theory of Garden of Eden configurations in tessellation automata. We consider spaces of at most two dimensions but with transition functions having arbitrarily large neighborhoods. A configuration c is said to be Garden of Eden of degree n just in case there is no configuration from which c can arise in n time steps; c is Garden of Eden of minimal degree n just in case there is no smaller m such that c is Garden of Eden of degree m. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Garden of Eden configurations of higher degree (and of degree 1) are established. Results are obtained relating decision procedures for Garden of Eden configurations of degree one to decision procedures for Garden of Eden configurations of higher degree.