Heterogeneous azeotropic distillation is a widely used technique to separate binary azeotropic mixtures into their components. One of its most important applications is the dehydration of ethanol, which is blended with gasoline to obtain automobile fuel. Among all the compounds…

Social knowledge is one of the key aspects of MAS in order to face complex problems in dynamical environments. However, it is usually incorporated without specific support on behalf of the platform and that does not let agents take all…

Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer an approach to solve complex problems where data and control are inherently distributed among several agents. Normally, agents have to cope with conflicts based on inconsistent knowledge which arise when they exchange information. A relative common…

Purpose – Faced with increasing environmental problems, traditional methods for transmitting information regarding corporate environmental actions are insufficient. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to suggest the environmental capital report, the knowledge map and the balanced scorecard as alternative…

Metacognition loosely refers to one’s “thinking about thinking” and is often defined by its accompanying skills (such as monitoring and evaluating). Despite the tendency for researchers to use metacognition as an overarching umbrella term, cognitive and educational theorists argue as…

Data mining is at the core of the knowledge discovery process. However, an initial preprocessing step is crucial for assuring reliable results within this process. Preprocessing of data is a time-consuming and non-trivial task since data quality issues should be…

Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we have…

Purpose – Information and communication technologies have became pervasive in people’s lives and in this changing world education cannot remain anchored in old-fashioned models which ignore the evolution through which society is going. This paper seeks to present the gamble…

In big companies, managerial activities and organizational boundaries will over time hide most unevenly developed skill and knowledge distribution patterns; studying the organizations with the means of modern applied physics is thus quite difficult. People are forced to communicate along…

Design and optimization of distillation columns for ethanol dehydration, using a hydrocarbon as entrainer, implies a good knowledge of vapor-liquid (VLE), liquid-liquid (LLE) and vapor-liquid-liquid equilibrium (VLLE). Chemical process simulation programs always require the use of a thermodynamic model that…