267,932 research outputs found
HOW IMPROVED CORROSION CONTROL PRACTICES IN THE U.S. NAVY'S ARLEIGH BURKE CLASS DESTROYER ENGINEERING SPACES MIGHT ENHANCE SHIP EFFICIENCY WHILE OPERATING
This research attempted to answer how improved corrosion-control practices in the U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke Class Destroyer engineering spaces might enhance ship efficiency. It can be confidently stated that effective corrosion control in Arleigh Burke Destroyer engineering spaces clearly enhances ship efficiency. A semi-systematic review of the literature was used as a methodology. Data were mined using a Synthesis Matrix that isolated meta-narratives that were used later in a meta-analysis of the literature. The identified meta-narratives led to eleven emerging patterns. These patterns were condensed into six major themes and finally synthesized into two primary categories: corrosion control and ship efficiency. Although no causal relationships were proven, strong interrelationships were identified. The findings of this research recommend that in order to control corrosion and enhance ship efficiency, two strategies should be followed: 1) an implemented maintenance plan requiring training for the crew in techniques and knowledge acquisition that promote understanding of the science of corrosion and 2) decisions regarding materials selection, surface coatings, and corrosion control should be made with total ownership costs in mind, because for a ship to function efficiently it must be operational a majority of its work life.Lieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited
Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management
Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has
increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be
able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute
and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of
services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available
with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs
requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences
and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several
advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge
representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business
requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and
enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The
article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy
for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate
flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for
Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS),
submitted 19th March 200
Application of Computational Intelligence Techniques to Process Industry Problems
In the last two decades there has been a large progress in the computational
intelligence research field. The fruits of the effort spent on the research in the discussed
field are powerful techniques for pattern recognition, data mining, data modelling, etc.
These techniques achieve high performance on traditional data sets like the UCI
machine learning database. Unfortunately, this kind of data sources usually represent
clean data without any problems like data outliers, missing values, feature co-linearity,
etc. common to real-life industrial data. The presence of faulty data samples can have
very harmful effects on the models, for example if presented during the training of the
models, it can either cause sub-optimal performance of the trained model or in the worst
case destroy the so far learnt knowledge of the model. For these reasons the application
of present modelling techniques to industrial problems has developed into a research
field on its own. Based on the discussion of the properties and issues of the data and the
state-of-the-art modelling techniques in the process industry, in this paper a novel
unified approach to the development of predictive models in the process industry is
presented
Beliefs and Conflicts in a Real World Multiagent System
In a real world multiagent system, where the
agents are faced with partial, incomplete and
intrinsically dynamic knowledge, conflicts are
inevitable. Frequently, different agents have
goals or beliefs that cannot hold simultaneously.
Conflict resolution methodologies have to be
adopted to overcome such undesirable occurrences.
In this paper we investigate the application of
distributed belief revision techniques as the support
for conflict resolution in the analysis of the
validity of the candidate beams to be produced
in the CERN particle accelerators.
This CERN multiagent system contains a higher
hierarchy agent, the Specialist agent, which
makes use of meta-knowledge (on how the conflicting
beliefs have been produced by the other
agents) in order to detect which beliefs should be
abandoned. Upon solving a conflict, the Specialist
instructs the involved agents to revise their
beliefs accordingly.
Conflicts in the problem domain are mapped into
conflicting beliefs of the distributed belief revision
system, where they can be handled by
proven formal methods. This technique builds
on well established concepts and combines them
in a new way to solve important problems. We
find this approach generally applicable in several
domains
Maintenance of Automated Test Suites in Industry: An Empirical study on Visual GUI Testing
Context: Verification and validation (V&V) activities make up 20 to 50
percent of the total development costs of a software system in practice. Test
automation is proposed to lower these V&V costs but available research only
provides limited empirical data from industrial practice about the maintenance
costs of automated tests and what factors affect these costs. In particular,
these costs and factors are unknown for automated GUI-based testing.
Objective: This paper addresses this lack of knowledge through analysis of
the costs and factors associated with the maintenance of automated GUI-based
tests in industrial practice.
Method: An empirical study at two companies, Siemens and Saab, is reported
where interviews about, and empirical work with, Visual GUI Testing is
performed to acquire data about the technique's maintenance costs and
feasibility.
Results: 13 factors are observed that affect maintenance, e.g. tester
knowledge/experience and test case complexity. Further, statistical analysis
shows that developing new test scripts is costlier than maintenance but also
that frequent maintenance is less costly than infrequent, big bang maintenance.
In addition a cost model, based on previous work, is presented that estimates
the time to positive return on investment (ROI) of test automation compared to
manual testing.
Conclusions: It is concluded that test automation can lower overall software
development costs of a project whilst also having positive effects on software
quality. However, maintenance costs can still be considerable and the less time
a company currently spends on manual testing, the more time is required before
positive, economic, ROI is reached after automation
A canonical theory of dynamic decision-making
Decision-making behavior is studied in many very different fields, from medicine and eco- nomics to psychology and neuroscience, with major contributions from mathematics and statistics, computer science, AI, and other technical disciplines. However the conceptual- ization of what decision-making is and methods for studying it vary greatly and this has resulted in fragmentation of the field. A theory that can accommodate various perspectives may facilitate interdisciplinary working. We present such a theory in which decision-making is articulated as a set of canonical functions that are sufficiently general to accommodate diverse viewpoints, yet sufficiently precise that they can be instantiated in different ways for specific theoretical or practical purposes. The canons cover the whole decision cycle, from the framing of a decision based on the goals, beliefs, and background knowledge of the decision-maker to the formulation of decision options, establishing preferences over them, and making commitments. Commitments can lead to the initiation of new decisions and any step in the cycle can incorporate reasoning about previous decisions and the rationales for them, and lead to revising or abandoning existing commitments. The theory situates decision-making with respect to other high-level cognitive capabilities like problem solving, planning, and collaborative decision-making. The canonical approach is assessed in three domains: cognitive and neuropsychology, artificial intelligence, and decision engineering
Effects of education on low-phosphate diet and phosphate binder intake to control serum phosphate among maintenance hemodialysis patients: A randomized controlled trial.
Background:For phosphate control, patient education is essential due to the limited clearance of phosphate by dialysis. However, well-designed randomized controlled trials about dietary and phosphate binder education have been scarce. Methods:We enrolled maintenance hemodialysis patients and randomized them into an education group (n = 48) or a control group (n = 22). We assessed the patients' drug compliance and their knowledge about the phosphate binder using a questionnaire. Results:The primary goal was to increase the number of patients who reached a calcium-phosphorus product of lower than 55. In the education group, 36 (75.0%) patients achieved the primary goal, as compared with 16 (72.7%) in the control group (P = 0.430). The education increased the proportion of patients who properly took the phosphate binder (22.9% vs. 3.5%, P = 0.087), but not to statistical significance. Education did not affect the amount of dietary phosphate intake per body weight (education vs. control: -1.18 ± 3.54 vs. -0.88 ± 2.04 mg/kg, P = 0.851). However, the dietary phosphate-to-protein ratio tended to be lower in the education group (-0.64 ± 2.04 vs. 0.65 ± 3.55, P = 0.193). The education on phosphate restriction affected neither the Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment score (0.17 ± 4.58 vs. -0.86 ± 3.86, P = 0.363) nor the level of dietary protein intake (-0.03 ± 0.33 vs. -0.09 ± 0.18, P = 0.569). Conclusion:Education did not affect the calcium-phosphate product. Education on the proper timing of phosphate binder intake and the dietary phosphate-to-protein ratio showed marginal efficacy
Web services synchronization health care application
With the advance of Web Services technologies and the emergence of Web
Services into the information space, tremendous opportunities for empowering
users and organizations appear in various application domains including
electronic commerce, travel, intelligence information gathering and analysis,
health care, digital government, etc. In fact, Web services appear to be s
solution for integrating distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous information
sources. However, as Web services evolve in a dynamic environment which is the
Internet many changes can occur and affect them. A Web service is affected when
one or more of its associated information sources is affected by schema
changes. Changes can alter the information sources contents but also their
schemas which may render Web services partially or totally undefined. In this
paper, we propose a solution for integrating information sources into Web
services. Then we tackle the Web service synchronization problem by
substituting the affected information sources. Our work is illustrated with a
healthcare case study.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figure
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