Livelihood, locality and globalisation

Inaugural lecture Katholieke Universiteit Nijmege

Design and analysis of cross vaults along history

The history of cross vaults began almost 2,000 years ago with a widespread use during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, becoming nowadays one of the most diffused and fascinating structural typologies of the European building cultural heritage. However, conversely to the undeniable excellence achieved by the ancient masons, the structural behavior of these elements is still at the center of the scientific debate. In this regard, with the aim of reviewing the knowledge on this subject as a concise and valuable support for researchers involved in conservation of historical buildings, with a focus on design rules and structural analysis, the present study firstly introduces the cross vaults from a historical perspective, by describing the evolution of the main geometrical shapes together with basic practical rules used to size them. Then, the article deals with the subsequent advancements in structural analysis methods of vaults, until the development of modern limit analysis.This work was partially carried out under the program "Dipartimento di Protezione Civile - Consorzio RELUIS", signed on 2013-12-27.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Simulation of the Dynamics of Nonplayer Characters' Emotions and Social Relations in Games

International audienc

Expressing Social Attitudes in Virtual Agents for Social Coaching

This paper presents a model of social attitudes for reasoning about the appropriate attitude to express during an interaction. It combines a theoretical approach with a study of a corpus of human-to-human interactions

Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities

The environment has been recognized as an explicit and exploitable element to design multi-agent systems (MAS). It can be assigned a number of responsibilities that would be more difficult to design with the sole notion of agents. To support the engineering of these responsibilities, we identify a set of mechanisms that offer solutions to software designers. We describe the mechanisms, their usage in representative projects, and potential opportunities for further research and applications. The purpose of this article is to clarify the notion of environment in terms of mechanisms, from their abstract description to their practical exploitation. Mechanisms are expected to provide agent-based software designers with a set of design elements to build MAS that take advantage of the environment

Simulating human activities to investigate household energy consumption

This paper presents a multi-agent model and simulator for the investigation of inhabitants' behaviour in relation with energy consumption in a household, at a fine-grain level. We present the meta-model that allows non-computer specialists to define the household activities, and the SMACH simulator that helps specialists analyse behaviour and manage and control energy consumption. We illustrate on concrete example scenarios how the system's adaptation mechanisms allow us to outline behavioural patterns