Hon& of America has developed a comprehensive approach to teaching the principles of lean
production to its suppliers. The centerpiece of these efforts is a program called BP (for ?Best process?,
?Best Performance ?, ?Bs Practice?), in which a crossfunctional…

There is a great need among educators for a way to quickly assign teams in large or distance learning classrooms in a manner superior to random assignment or student self-selection. Forming teams based on knowledge of students' characteristics is too…

The Telematics Industry faces tremendous challenges for growth. Regardless of the efforts and investment from vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, telematics has not been that profitable industry that many analyst forecasted five years ago; a 40 billion industry by 2003. This…

Organizations must establish processes for managing knowledge across boundaries because of the specialized and task-dependent forms of knowledge required to deliver products and services. To address this challenge an integrative framework is developed that identifies and integrates the value of…

This paper analyzes the suitability of reinforcement learning (RL) for both programming and adapting situated agents. We discuss two RL algorithms: Q-learning and the Bucket Brigade. We introduce a special case of the Bucket Brigade, and analyze and compare its…

Three important trends - unrelenting globalization, growing worldwide electronic connectivity, and increasing knowledge intensity of economic activity - are creating new opportunities for global politics, with challenging demands for information access, interpretation, provision and overall use. This has serious implications…

by Levent M. Talgar., Thesis (S.B. and M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998., Includes bibliographical references (leaf 32).

The Phase Space is a powerful tool for representing and reasoning about the qualitative behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems. Significant physical phenomena of the dynamical system---periodicity, recurrence, stability and the like---are reflected by outstanding geometric features of the trajectories in…

Explanation-based learning occurs when something useful is retained from an explanation, usually an account of how some particular problem can be solved given a sound theory. Many real-world explanations are not based on sound theory, however, and wrong things may…

by Robert J. Grochowski., Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil Engineering, 1988., Includes bibliographical references.