Abstract
In an avoidable harmful situation, autonomous vehicles systems are expected to choose the course of action that causes the less damage to everybody. However, this behavioral protocol implies some predictability. In this context, we show that if the autonomous vehicle decision process is perfectly known then malicious, opportunistic, terrorist, criminal and non-civic individuals may have incentives to manipulate it. Consequently, some levels of uncertainty are necessary for the system to be manipulation proof. Uncertainty removes the mis-behavior incentives because it increases the risk and likelihood of unsuccessful manipulation. However, uncertainty may also decrease the quality of the decision process with negative impact in terms of efficiency and welfare for the society. We also discuss other possible solutions to this problem.

Abstract
The use of sensing devices to perform monitoring tasks has continuously evolved in the past decades [...]

Abstract
The development and study of new, more robust and powerful wavefront sensors plays an important role in the improvement of the wavefront sensing capabilities of adaptive optics systems. The LAM-ONERA On-sky Pyramid Sensor is a R&D bench dedicated to study and characterize these new wavefront sensors. In this paper, we give a glance at the current status of the bench in terms of hardware and at the most recent results obtained using new flavours of Fourier filtering wavefront sensors.

Abstract
We propose adding an irregular quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation to a wireless transmission scheme in order to obtain greater control over the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required to successfully decode the signal. By altering the separation between adjacent symbols, the minimum required SNR is raised without degradation in the performance of the scheme. This allows the system to adapt to preferable channel conditions for the authorized user, making it harder for eavesdroppers to intercept and decode the transmission, thus making the communication safer. In addition, we show that by overlaying a coset code onto the QAM constellation, a new, stronger security gap metric can be further improved. Results show the effectiveness of this strategy with an interleaved coding for secrecy with a hidden key (ICSHK) scheme.

Abstract

Abstract
In the food retail sector, maintaining the food quality across the supply chain is of vital importance. The quality of the products is dependent on its storage and transportation conditions and this peculiarity increases the supply chain complexity relatively to other types of retailers. Actually, in this industry there are three types of food supply chains: frozen, chilled and ambient. Moreover, food retailers run different store formats, of different sizes, assortments and sales volume. In this study we research the trade-off between consolidating a range of products in order to perform direct deliveries to the stores versus performing separate delivery routes for products with different transportation requirements. A new consistency dimension is proposed regarding the periodicity that a consolidation strategy is implemented. The aim of this paper is to define a consolidation strategy for the delivery mode planning that allows to smooth the complexity of grocery retail operations. A three-step approach is proposed to tackle a real size problem in a case-study with a major Portuguese grocery retailer. By changing the consolidation strategy with a complete consistent plan the company could reach annual savings of around 4%. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.