Influencing interaction: Development of the design with intent method

Persuasive Technology has the potential to influence user behavior for social benefit, e.g. to reduce environmental impact, but designers are lacking guidance choosing among design techniques for influencing interaction. The Design with Intent Method, a ‘suggestion tool’ addressing this problem, is introduced in this paper, and applied to the briefs of reducing unnecessary household lighting use, and improving the efficiency of printing, primarily to evaluate the method’s usability and guide the direction of its development. The trial demonstrates that the DwI Method is quick to apply and leads to a range of relevant design concepts. With development, the DwI Method could be a useful tool for designers working on influencing user behavior

Revisiting lagrange relaxation (LR) for processing large-scale mixed integer programming (MIP) problems

Lagrangean Relaxation has been successfully applied to process many well known instances of NP-hard Mixed Integer Programming problems. In this paper we present a Lagrangean Relaxation based generic solver for processing Mixed Integer Programming problems. We choose the constraints, which are relaxed using a constraint classification scheme. The tactical issue of updating the Lagrange multiplier is addressed through sub-gradient optimisation; alternative rules for updating their values are investigated. The Lagrangean relaxation provides a lower bound to the original problem and the upper bound is calculated using a heuristic technique. The bounds obtained by the Lagrangean Relaxation based generic solver were used to warm-start the Branch and Bound algorithm; the performance of the generic solver and the effect of the alternative control settings are reported for a wide class of benchmark models. Finally, we present an alternative technique to calculate the upper bound, using a genetic algorithm that benefits from the mathematical structure of the constraints. The performance of the genetic algorithm is also presented

Operational Research in Education

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

The design with intent method: A design tool for influencing user behaviour

The official published version can be found at the link below.Using product and system design to influence user behaviour offers potential for improving performance and reducing user error, yet little guidance is available at the concept generation stage for design teams briefed with influencing user behaviour. This article presents the Design with Intent Method, an innovation tool for designers working in this area, illustrated via application to an everyday human–technology interaction problem: reducing the likelihood of a customer leaving his or her card in an automatic teller machine. The example application results in a range of feasible design concepts which are comparable to existing developments in ATM design, demonstrating that the method has potential for development and application as part of a user-centred design process

Sterilized Foreign Exchange Market Interventions in a Chartist-Fundamentalist Exchange Rate Model

Sterilized foreign exchange market interventions are commonly dismissed by economists as an ineffective policy instrument. Nevertheless many central banks operating under independently floating exchange rates regimes are often engaged in sales and purchases of foreign exchange in order to manipulate the current value of their currencies. In this paper we argue that the skepticism of many economists can be ascribed to their orientation on fundamental-based, efficient-market exchange rate models. Given their weak empirical support, however, it is unreasonable to evaluate the effectiveness of sterilized foreign exchange interventions against the background of this class of models. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of sterilized foreign exchange market interventions on the basis of a more suitable model. Using a chartist-fundamentalist model we show that central banks can influence exchange rates by using sterilized interventions. In particular, turning points occur earlier and exchange rate misalignments are substantially reduced. --Foreign exchange,central bank intervention,heterogeneous expectation

PID control system analysis, design, and technology

Designing and tuning a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller appears to be conceptually intuitive, but can be hard in practice, if multiple (and often conflicting) objectives such as short transient and high stability are to be achieved. Usually, initial designs obtained by all means need to be adjusted repeatedly through computer simulations until the closed-loop system performs or compromises as desired. This stimulates the development of "intelligent" tools that can assist engineers to achieve the best overall PID control for the entire operating envelope. This development has further led to the incorporation of some advanced tuning algorithms into PID hardware modules. Corresponding to these developments, this paper presents a modern overview of functionalities and tuning methods in patents, software packages and commercial hardware modules. It is seen that many PID variants have been developed in order to improve transient performance, but standardising and modularising PID control are desired, although challenging. The inclusion of system identification and "intelligent" techniques in software based PID systems helps automate the entire design and tuning process to a useful degree. This should also assist future development of "plug-and-play" PID controllers that are widely applicable and can be set up easily and operate optimally for enhanced productivity, improved quality and reduced maintenance requirements