11 research outputs found
Decision Maps for Distributed Scenario-Based Multi-Criteria Decision Support
This thesis presents the Decision Map approach to support decision-makers facing complex uncertain problems that defy standardised solutions. First, scenarios are generated in a distributed manner: the reasoning processes can be adapted to the problem at hand whilst respecting constraints in time and availability of experts. Second, by integrating scenarios and MCDA, this approach facilitates robust decision-making respecting multiple criteria in a transparent well-structured manner
Multiple-Criteria Decision Making
Decision-making on real-world problems, including individual process decisions, requires an appropriate and reliable decision support system. Fuzzy set theory, rough set theory, and neutrosophic set theory, which are MCDM techniques, are useful for modeling complex decision-making problems with imprecise, ambiguous, or vague data.This Special Issue, âMultiple Criteria Decision Makingâ, aims to incorporate recent developments in the area of the multi-criteria decision-making field. Topics include, but are not limited to:- MCDM optimization in engineering;- Environmental sustainability in engineering processes;- Multi-criteria production and logistics process planning;- New trends in multi-criteria evaluation of sustainable processes;- Multi-criteria decision making in strategic management based on sustainable criteria
Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns
Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse
Semantic and pragmatic characterization of learning objects
Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia InformĂĄtica. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201
AVOIDING COLLAPSE: RESILIENCE AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN VULNERABLE SMALL ISLANDS
Small islands dependent on reef fisheries, farming and tourism are vulnerable to rising
human and natural pressures and may target "sustainable" development. Marine Protected
Areas (MPA) have a proven ability to meet ecological goals, such as restoring fisheries and
preserving ecosystem function across scales. However, there is a comparative lack of
scientific baseline data and social research which may help local MPA to overcome failures
in achieving mixed conservation and development goals in populated coastal areas facing
intense pressure. This fieldwork-based case study researched in French and Creole
languages in the sub-tropical, mid-Oceanic island of Rodrigues (Mauritius, Indian Ocean)
addresses two main questions: "Are conservation and development compatible goals for
MPA in small islands reliant on fisheries and tourism?", and, "Do social-ecological resilience
concepts help clarify related issues of sustainability?". Results from two quantitative surveys
with fishers {n=93) and tourists (n=351) on one level support a "win-win" scenario for
conservation and development. Local fishers' knowledge suggested marine fish species
including large predators of ecological and economic significance had been in decline for
decades. Tourists' stated willingness to pay to use Marine and Coastal Protected Areas
could help fund consen/ation of biodiversity and fishery enhancement, with fee options
ranging from MPA up to island-level. Beyond this, downside risks emerged from qualitative
interviews with key informants (n=70) and historical analysis of island-level social-ecological
resilience testing the explanatory value of the conceptual Adaptive Cycle model (Holling and
Gunderson 2002). A recent crisis catalysed by severe drought (1970s) led to deep social
and ecological changes (collapse in farming, migration and external dependence), while
subsequent policies failed to address key drivers, instead creating negative feedbacks
ensuring degradation extended outward from the coast. Remote and vulnerable small
islands with few resources (forests, soil, water, energy) need significant capital inputs from
higher scales which are seldom taken into account in determining the balance of winners
and losers in conservation and development policy at MPA or island level. A lack of interisland
trust (social capital), water scarcity, climate change and migration arise as critical
issues for the future. Rodrigues characterises the secondary importance of island regions
within larger Island states, and underlines the cross-scale and cross-temporal nature of
sustainability in resilience terms. This thesis' main contribution lies in its first demonstration
of shifting baselines in an island reef fishery or MPA context. Findings contributed to the
establishment of MPA In the fieldwork site of Rodrigues, and are of broad relevance for
MPA policy across the tropics and beyond. More studies are needed across other
ecosystems and cultures
Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion. Collected Works, Volume 5
This ïŹfth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different ïŹelds of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered.
First Part of this book presents some theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modiïŹed Proportional ConïŹict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classiïŹers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes.
Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identiïŹcation of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classiïŹcation.
Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classiïŹcation, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well
New Advances in Formosan Linguistics
The present volume is a festschrift in honour of Lillian M. Huang, who, in a very few
years, became a leading figure in Formosan linguistics after she obtained her PhD degree
in 1987. Over the past twenty-eight years, she has been involved in important
groundwork, in both academia and indigenous language policies in Taiwan, as we will
show below (sections 3 and 4). She has been engaged in the development of both through
her pre-eminent role in projects relating to typological studies on Formosan languages in
the early 1990s, and on language teaching materials and proficiency tests since the late
1990s and early 2000s.
Lillian may retire in a few years. Before she does, we thought it would be most
appropriate to honour her by putting together papers by a number of scholars and students
who have benefitted from or have been in contact with her in one way or another (e.g.
through collaborative work, teaching, supervising, advising etc.). The idea of such a
volume was conceived by Elizabeth Zeitoun in the autumn of 2009. Further plans were
initially worked out with Stacy F. Teng, soon joined by Joy J. Wu. The three editors have
been close to Lillian since the early and mid 1990s. Of the three, Zeitoun, who has been
working with her on diverse projects for over twenty years, is her closest collaborator on
the academic level. Both Wu and Teng were Lillianâs MA supervisees. Through her
fieldwork courses, she introduced Wu to Amis and Teng to Puyuma, languages on which
they are still working.
The title of the present volume, New advances in Formosan linguistics, reflects our
pursuit of publishing cutting-edge, provocative, and thoughtful papers that explore new
directions and perspectives on Formosan languages and linguistics. It is worth noticing
that this is the first collected volume on Formosan languages that has not issued from a
workshop or a conferenceâthe papers included in this volume are thus varied in terms of
topic coverageâand the first that specifically deals with (and covers nearly all) the
Formosan languages, a grouping understood in its broader context, that is, including
Yami, a Batanic (Philippine) language spoken on Orchid Island under the political
jurisdiction of Taiwan. (Note: first three paragraphs of foreward)
Ideophone im AwetĂ
The dissertation describes the phenomenon of ideophones in AwetĂ, a Tupian language spoken in the Amazonian lowlands in Central Brazil. Ideophones are marked words in AwetĂ discourse which are performed rather than simply spoken and which depict salient features of activities. The dissertation also includes a concise grammar of the AwetĂ language.Die Doktorarbeit beschreibt das PhĂ€nomen der Ideophone in AwetĂ, einer Tupi-Sprache, die im Amazonastiefland in Zentralbrasilien gesprochen wird. Bei Ideophonen handelt es sich um markierte Wörter im AwetĂ Diskurs, die zusĂ€tzlich zur rein sprachlichen eine performative Ebene haben und perzeptionell auffĂ€llige Eigenschaften von AktivitĂ€ten abbilden. Die Dissertation enthĂ€lt zusĂ€tzlich eine Kurzgrammatik des AwetĂ
Fuelling the zero-emissions road freight of the future: routing of mobile fuellers
The future of zero-emissions road freight is closely tied to the sufficient availability of new and clean fuel options such as electricity and Hydrogen. In goods distribution using Electric Commercial Vehicles (ECVs) and Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles (HFCVs) a major challenge in the transition period would pertain to their limited autonomy and scarce and unevenly distributed refuelling stations. One viable solution to facilitate and speed up the adoption of ECVs/HFCVs by logistics, however, is to get the fuel to the point where it is needed (instead of diverting the route of delivery vehicles to refuelling stations) using "Mobile Fuellers (MFs)". These are mobile battery swapping/recharging vans or mobile Hydrogen fuellers that can travel to a running ECV/HFCV to provide the fuel they require to complete their delivery routes at a rendezvous time and space. In this presentation, new vehicle routing models will be presented for a third party company that provides MF services. In the proposed problem variant, the MF provider company receives routing plans of multiple customer companies and has to design routes for a fleet of capacitated MFs that have to synchronise their routes with the running vehicles to deliver the required amount of fuel on-the-fly. This presentation will discuss and compare several mathematical models based on different business models and collaborative logistics scenarios