Modelling conflict management in design: an explicit approach

This paper focusses on how conflicts that arise during a design process and the management of conflicts can be modelled. A number of possible conflict types are distinguished and it is described how each of them can be detected during the design process, using an explicit meta-representation. Furthermore, it is shown how these conflict types can be analyzed and managed by means of strategic meta-knowledge about design processes. © 1995, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved

The Effect of National Culture on Evacuation Response Behaviour: A Cross-Cultural Survey

Are there cultural differences and similarities in the way occupants respond to evacuation notifications? Evacuation response behaviour is characterised by the way occupants react to evacuation notifications to validate what is happening around them and prepare for evacuation movement. This study presents a cross-cultural survey based on a case study of a library evacuation to specifically explore how national culture - combined with cues and affiliation - influence evacuation response behaviour. A total of 585 adults from Czech Republic, Poland, Turkey and the United Kingdom participated in the survey. The main results show that for the three scenarios explored (1) UK participants perform significantly fewer response tasks than participants from the other countries, (2) participants from all countries first look around to see what is happening, and seek additional information as one of the first three tasks they perform, (3) Czech, Turkish and UK participants are more likely to wait for a friend/colleague in a scenario without cues than with cues. These results provide insights for safety practitioners and other stakeholders on the importance of cross-cultural research for evacuation behaviour and its inclusion in policy making and emergency preparation

Agents and Service-Oriented Computing for Autonomic Computing: A Research Agenda

Autonomic computing is the solution proposed to cope with the complexity of today\u27s computing environments. Self-management, an important element of autonomic computing, is also characteristic of single and multiagent systems, as well as systems based on service-oriented architectures. Combining these technologies can be profitable for all - in particular, for the development of autonomic computing systems

Adaptive knowledge representation for a self-managing home energy usage system

Automated and effcient energy management has many potential benefits for producers and consumers of energy, and the environment. Focusing on energy management on the consumer side, this paper considers two forms of energy management: minimizing energy usage in single households and avoiding peaks in energy consumption in a larger area.\ud A combination of context aware and autonomic computing is used to describe an automated and self-managing system that, by analyzing context information and adapting to its environment, can learn the behavior of household occupants. Based on this information, together with user defined policies, energy usage is lowered by selectively powering down devices. By powering specific thermostatically controlled devices on or off energy can also be redistributed over time. This is utilized to avoid global peaks in energy usage.\ud The self-managing system reasons about context and other information and acts when required. This information is the knowledge with which it can adaptively reason, about to take to ensure effcient energy usage. This paper explores the requirements that hold for representing this knowledge and how the knowledge base can continuously and adaptively be updated: to be self-managing