(cont.) To demonstrate its practical value in large-scale engineering systems, the research applied OPN to two space exploration programs and one aircraft design problem. In our experiments, OPN was able to significantly change the modeling and architectural reasoning process by…

In recent years we have seen a confluence of science and technology that portends great impact to business strategy and product development. Just as physicists, chemists and biologists have extended their knowledge to other fields in pursuit of their own…

Policies to avert the threat of dangerous climate change focus on stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations by drastically reducing anthropogenic emissions of carbon. Such reductions require limiting the use of fossil fuels-which supply the bulk of energy to economic activity,…

(cont.) reached very high values early in the experiment and was significantly but slightly lower in FC than in GC. The target position relative to the subject's body did not affect performance, but subjects responded significantly faster when they were…

Banking channel management has become a crucial component in the drive for improved efficiency. Since the channel is the interlocutor between customers and products, banks are leveraging their knowledge of channels to efficiently address perfect product portfolio through the most…

In this work we present an approach to model an action-oriented system controlled by BDI agents using a defeasible argumentation formalism to represent its knowledge. Here, our main concern will be modelling the software agents that drive the physical robots.

Signature schemes are fundamental cryptographic primitives, useful as a stand-alone application, and as a building block in the design of secure protocols and other cryptographic objects. In this thesis, we study both the uses that signature schemes find in protocols,…

The contribution of this thesis is to provide a tractable framework for supply chains and revenue management problems subject to uncertainty that gives insight into the structure of the optimal policy and requires little knowledge of the underlying probability distributions.…

Flow Accelerated Corrosion (FAC) is the most prevalent material degradation mechanism for low carbon steel in steam-water flow systems. The band of uncertainty in predictions of wear rate due to FAC spans one to two orders of magnitude. Such a…

(cont.) which are then applied to developmentally acquire new object representations. The humanoid robot therefore sees the world through the caregiver's eyes. Building an artificial humanoid robot's brain, even at an infant's cognitive level, has been a long quest which…