The design of intelligent agents is greatly influenced by the many different models that exist to represent knowledge. It is essential that such agents have computationally adequate mechanisms to manage its knowledge, which more often than not is incomplete and/or…

Much effort has been dedicated to provide a general model of agents working in complex environments. This research focuses on the high level cognition used in determining the behavior of the agent.
The language of the Situation Calculus represents a…

Tardiness related objectives are of utmost importance in production systems when client satisfaction is a main goal of a company. These objectives measure the system response to the client requirements and rate manager´s performance In scheduling problems with diverse single…

A multiagent system (MAS) is made up of multiple interacting autonomous agents. It can be viewed as a society in which each agent performs its activity, cooperating to achieve common goals, or competing for them. Thus, every agent has the…

Modeling is one of the most crucial activities during all the phases in any software development life cycle. Typically, system development is a very complex task, and working with models helps to handle this complexity in an organized way, allowing…

In the last few years, several studies have emphasized the use of ontologies as an alternative to organization of the information.
The notion of ontology has become popular in fields such as intelligent information integration, information retrieval on the Internet,…

Lawyers often need to look for previous similar legal cases when analysing new ones.
The more previous cases, the more time is spent. Classical search engines execute termbased retrieval, which may miss relevant documents as well as fetch several irrelevant…

This work describes a multi agent system designed to support the management of tacit knowledge that belongs to people of an organization. This is a distributed knowledge management system based on the use of mobile agents, which receive the user's…

Instruction may be seen as the intentional creation of conditions around learning so as to facilitate the achievement of determined goals. Normally, instruction is based upon certain educational strategies. It is well accepted in the field of educational technology that…

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are merely blind search algorithms, which only make use of the relative fitness of solutions, but completely ignore the nature of the problem. Their performance can be improved by using new multirecombinative approaches, which provide a good…