In this thesis we prove the existence of m-armed spiral wave solutions for the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation in the circular and spherical geometries. Instead of applying the shooting method in the literature, we establish a functional approach and generalize the known results of existence for rigidly-rotating spiral waves. Moreover, we prove the existence of two new patterns: frozen spirals...

We investigate people’s attitudes towards the possible use of mobile negotiation support systems (NSS) in different social contexts and the consequences for their design. For that purpose we developed an online survey based on existing models of technology acceptance. In the questionnaire we showed five filmed scenarios of NSS use contexts. The data collected from 120 respondents, showed (a) th...

Sufficiency criteria are established to ensure the asymptotic stability and boundedness of solutions to third-order nonlinear delay differential equations of the form ... x (t) + e(x(t), ẋ(t), ẍ(t))ẍ(t) + g(x(t− r), ẋ(t− r)) + ψ(x(t− r)) = p(t, x(t), x(t − r), x(t), x(t− r), x(t)). By using Lyapunov’s functional approach, we obtain two new results on the subject, which include and improve some ...

Various researchers and policy analysts have made empirical studies of innovation systems in order to understand their current structure and trace their dynamics. However, policy makers often experience difficulties in extracting practical guidelines from studies of this kind. In this paper, we operationalize our previous work on a functional approach to analyzing innovation system dynamics int...

A new market based approach for transmission expansion planning in deregulated environments is presented in this paper. In this approach, transmission-planning decisions are made based on the electric power market conditions. The main contribution of this research is 1) Introducing a new probabilistic tool for analyzing the electric market conditions, 2) Defining new criteria for ranking transm...

We often describe lives (or parts of lives) as meaningful or as not meaningful. It is also common to characterize them as more or less meaningful. Some lives, we tend to think, are more meaningful than others. But how then can one compare lives with respect to how much meaning they contain? Can one? This paper argues that (i) only a notion of rough equality can be used when comparing different ...

Information, Uncertainty, and Subjective Entitlements in Bargaining More often than not production processes are the joint endeavor of people having different abilities and productivities. Such production processes and the associated surplus production are often not fully transparent in the sense that the relative contributions of involved agents are blurred; either by lack of information about...

In this short technical note we show how PADL – the process algebraic architectural description language of Bernardo, Ciancarini and Donatiello – can be used to specify AFrames. AFrames exist to structure the machine in a Problem Frames development, and are important in that framework as they allow architectural expertise to be captured and reused therein. Because of the close proximity of PADL...

The dynamic window approach is a well known navigation scheme developed in Fox et al. (1997) and extended in Brock and Khatib (1999). It is safe by construction and has been shown to perform very efficiently in experimental setups. However, one can construct examples where the proposed scheme fails to attain the goal configuration. What has been lacking is a theoretical treatment of the algorit...

Do People Seek to Maximize Their Subjective Well‐Being?* In a new survey we ask respondents, after a standard Subjective Well‐Being (SWB) question, if they can think of changes in their lives that would improve their SWB score. If the SWB score is just one argument among others in the respondents’ goals in life, they should easily find ways to improve it, at the expense of other dimensions they...