Centralized versus market-based approaches to mobile task allocation problem: State-of-the-art

Centralized approach has been adopted for finding solutions to resource allocation problems (RAPs) in many real-life applications. On the other hand, market-based approach has been proposed as an alternative to solve the problem due to recent advancement in ICT technologies. In spite of the existence of some efforts to review the pros and cons of each approach in RAPs, the studies cannot be directly applied to specific problem domains like mobile task allocation problem which is characterised with high level of uncertainty on the availability of resources (workers). This paper aims to review existing studies on task allocation problems(TAPs) focusing on those two approaches and their comparison and identify major issues that need to be resolved for comparing the two approaches in mobile task allocation problems. Mobile Task Allocation Problem (MTAP) is defined and its problematic structures are explained in relation with task allocation to mobile workers. Solutions produced by each approach to some applications and variations of MTAP are also discussed and compared. Finally, some future research directions are identified in order to compare both approaches in function of uncertainty emerging from the mobile nature of the MTAP

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Spring Symposium on Practical Approaches to Scheduling and Planning

The symposium presented issues involved in the development of scheduling systems that can deal with resource and time limitations. To qualify, a system must be implemented and tested to some degree on non-trivial problems (ideally, on real-world problems). However, a system need not be fully deployed to qualify. Systems that schedule actions in terms of metric time constraints typically represent and reason about an external numeric clock or calendar and can be contrasted with those systems that represent time purely symbolically. The following topics are discussed: integrating planning and scheduling; integrating symbolic goals and numerical utilities; managing uncertainty; incremental rescheduling; managing limited computation time; anytime scheduling and planning algorithms, systems; dependency analysis and schedule reuse; management of schedule and plan execution; and incorporation of discrete event techniques

Union Leadership and Member Attitudes: A Multi-Level Analysis

[Excerpt] Analyses of union leadership roles show that union presidents should have both a within-union focus and an external focus. The authors combined multi-level survey data from 3,871 union members in 248 local teachers’ unions with archival and field staff data to examine relationships between leadership and members’ perceptions of union instrumentality and justice, union commitment, and participation. The results showed significant union-level effects on members’ beliefs about, and attitudes toward, their unions, attributable to the presidents’ internal and external leadership, wage outcomes, and union characteristics. Relationships between internally focused leadership and members’ loyalty and willingness to work for the union were partially mediated by perceptions of union instrumentality and justice. These perceptions fully mediated the relationship between externally focused leadership and union loyalty

Consumption of Organic Foods from a Life History Perspective:An Explorative Study among Italian consumers

Taking into consideration individuals’ cognitive reasoning, and assuming that consumption of organic food has involved a change of mind about food experiences and food habits, we have identified the concepts, stories and theories mentioned by respondents in their discourses about organic food. Regular consumers trust organic products because they believe that they are healthier and tastier than any other product. A growing stock of information supports their food choice and confidence in organic food. Occasional consumers have strong beliefs about the better taste and the higher quality of organic food in general. Non organic users sometimes perceive organic food as a new fashion, the last fad. Organic food is still confused with close ‘substitutes’, such as ‘natural’, ‘macrobiotic’ and similar products. Many occasional consumers believe that regular consumers are somewhat obsessed with organic food and that they look and behave strangely. Organic products are generally perceived and experienced as expensive products, when compared to conventional alternatives. To organic consumer the rewards they perceive to gain from organic food is well beyond the resources (in terms of time and money) they employ to search for the higher quality of organic products. Institutional attempts to change consumer behaviour are commonly categorized into consumer information, consumer education and consumer advice (Peter et al., 1999).In order to increase both behavioural and attitudinal loyalty, the level of consumer information and product knowledge should be increased. Besides, consumers will become more committed if their beliefs regarding the intrinsic self-relevance of organic food will increase in the future

On-line planning and scheduling: an application to controlling modular printers

We present a case study of artificial intelligence techniques applied to the control of production printing equipment. Like many other real-world applications, this complex domain requires high-speed autonomous decision-making and robust continual operation. To our knowledge, this work represents the first successful industrial application of embedded domain-independent temporal planning. Our system handles execution failures and multi-objective preferences. At its heart is an on-line algorithm that combines techniques from state-space planning and partial-order scheduling. We suggest that this general architecture may prove useful in other applications as more intelligent systems operate in continual, on-line settings. Our system has been used to drive several commercial prototypes and has enabled a new product architecture for our industrial partner. When compared with state-of-the-art off-line planners, our system is hundreds of times faster and often finds better plans. Our experience demonstrates that domain-independent AI planning based on heuristic search can flexibly handle time, resources, replanning, and multiple objectives in a high-speed practical application without requiring hand-coded control knowledge

Spartan Daily, August 26, 2002

Volume 119, Issue 1https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10645/thumbnail.jp

An Approach to Agent-Based Service Composition and Its Application to Mobile

This paper describes an architecture model for multiagent systems that was developed in the European project LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Agent Platform). Its main feature is a set of generic services that are implemented independently of the agents and can be installed into the agents by the application developer in a flexible way. Moreover, two applications using this architecture model are described that were also developed within the LEAP project. The application domain is the support of mobile, virtual teams for the German automobile club ADAC and for British Telecommunications