The objective of this thesis is to clarify the ways that organizational factors influence nuclear power plant performance in order to improve performance. Therefore, this thesis studied the nuclear power plant organizational environment by identifying and detailing its important work…

Continued advances in the semiconductor industry will require the introduction of new materials and processes concurrent with shrinking device dimensions. These simultaneous demands drastically reduce margins for error and necessitate an increasingly quantitative understanding of semiconductor processes. Leaders of the…

All intelligence relies on search - for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the…

Two-electron mixed-valence complexes of rhodium may be supported by diphosphazane ligands (RN(PY2)2). Whereas diphosphazane ligands with strongly [pi]-acidic phosphine groups (Y = F, OCH2CF3) react with RhI starting materials to afford binuclear Rh20,II complexes, Rh20,II(MeN(PY)2)3X2(L) or Rh2"II(MeN(PY),)3X2 (X = Cl,…

Modem society requires reliable and safe operation of its infrastructure. Policymakers believe that, in many industries, competitive markets and regulatory incentives will result in system performance superior to that under command-and-control regulation. Analytical techniques to evaluate the reliability and safety…

Effective document retrieval using domain knowledge and semantics is one of the major challenges in Information Retrieval. Over the last years, there has been a growing interest in ontologies as an artifact for human knowledge representation and a critical component…

A fuzzy controller is usually designed by formulating the knowledge of a human expert into a set of linguistic variables and fuzzy rules. As it is well known, the use of prior knowledge can dramatically improve the performance and quality…

A fuzzy controller is usually designed by formulating the knowledge of a human expert into a set of linguistic variables and fuzzy rules. As it is well known, the use of prior knowledge can dramatically improve the performance and quality…

There exists a large amount of knowledge representation models. But most of them have significant limitations at the epistemic level. They do not have explanatory power. Most of them do not have means to represent some functional needs to work…

Metrics used on development of expert systems is not a well investigated problem area. This article suggests some metrics to be used to measure the maturity of the conceptualization process and the complexity of the decision process in the problem…