Using RoboCup to teach multiagent systems and the distributed mindset

This Essay addresses a debate that emerged in the Supreme Court\u27s decision last Term in Tennessee v. Lane, 124 S. Ct. 1978 (2004), regarding whether challenges to legislation enacted to enforce section five of the Fourteenth Amendment should be assessed on a facial or as-applied basis. It begins by reviewing the Court\u27s precedent involving claims that statutes exceed Congress\u27 enumerated powers to determine how the Court thus far has approached the question of facial challenges and severability in that context. One of the main points that emerges from this review is the confusion spawned by the Court\u27s current and unduly narrow definition of facial challenges as entailing the claim that a statute (or statutory provision) has no valid applications. This definition obscures both the range of forms facial challenges can take and the important role severability plays in the Court\u27s treatment of facial challenges. The Essay then turns to assessing whether, precedent aside, a doctrine of nonseverability should govern in the section five context, and answers this question in the negative. While section five statutes should not be immune from facial attack, the Essay argues that in assessing the merits of such challenges no reason exists to diverge from the ordinary rule that federal courts will presume unconstitutional applications of federal statutes are severable. It concludes with consideration of whether federalism concerns justify a departure from ordinary practice in other congressional power contexts

Multi-objective tools for the vehicle routing problem with time windows

Most real-life problems involve the simultaneous optimisation of two or more, usually conflicting, objectives. Researchers have put a continuous effort into solving these problems in many different areas, such as engineering, finance and computer science. Over time, thanks to the increase in processing power, researchers have created methods which have become increasingly sophisticated. Most of these methods have been based on the notion of Pareto dominance, which assumes, sometimes erroneously, that the objectives have no known ranking of importance. The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) is a logistics problem which in real-life applications appears to be multi-objective. This problem consists of designing the optimal set of routes to serve a number of customers within certain time slots. Despite this problem’s high applicability to real-life domains (e.g. waste collection, fast-food delivery), most research in this area has been conducted with hand-made datasets. These datasets sometimes have a number of unrealistic features (e.g. the assumption that one unit of travel time corresponds to one unit of travel distance) and are therefore not adequate for the assessment of optimisers. Furthermore, very few studies have focused on the multi-objective nature of the VRPTW. That is, very few have studied how the optimisation of one objective affects the others. This thesis proposes a number of novel tools (methods + dataset) to address the above- mentioned challenges: 1) an agent-based framework for cooperative search, 2) a novel multi-objective ranking approach, 3) a new dataset for the VRPTW, 4) a study of the pair-wise relationships between five common objectives in VRPTW, and 5) a simplified Multi-objective Discrete Particle Swarm Optimisation for the VRPTW

Multi-objective tools for the vehicle routing problem with time windows

Most real-life problems involve the simultaneous optimisation of two or more, usually conflicting, objectives. Researchers have put a continuous effort into solving these problems in many different areas, such as engineering, finance and computer science. Over time, thanks to the increase in processing power, researchers have created methods which have become increasingly sophisticated. Most of these methods have been based on the notion of Pareto dominance, which assumes, sometimes erroneously, that the objectives have no known ranking of importance. The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) is a logistics problem which in real-life applications appears to be multi-objective. This problem consists of designing the optimal set of routes to serve a number of customers within certain time slots. Despite this problem’s high applicability to real-life domains (e.g. waste collection, fast-food delivery), most research in this area has been conducted with hand-made datasets. These datasets sometimes have a number of unrealistic features (e.g. the assumption that one unit of travel time corresponds to one unit of travel distance) and are therefore not adequate for the assessment of optimisers. Furthermore, very few studies have focused on the multi-objective nature of the VRPTW. That is, very few have studied how the optimisation of one objective affects the others. This thesis proposes a number of novel tools (methods + dataset) to address the above- mentioned challenges: 1) an agent-based framework for cooperative search, 2) a novel multi-objective ranking approach, 3) a new dataset for the VRPTW, 4) a study of the pair-wise relationships between five common objectives in VRPTW, and 5) a simplified Multi-objective Discrete Particle Swarm Optimisation for the VRPTW

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC

Using RoboCup to Teach Multiagent Systems and the Distributed Mindset

We present our experiences using the RoboCup soccerserver simulator and Biter, our own agent platform, for the teaching of a graduate multiagent systems' class. The RoboCup simulator and Biter are both described. We argue that the combination of RoboCup and Biter forms an effective platform for the teaching of multiagent systems and the distributed mindset. Results from two semesters using these tools are presented. These results confirm our claims. Finally, we characterize this work within the framework provided by the STEELMA