Agriculture is an important engine of growth and poverty reduction in much of Africa, Nigeria inclusive. But the sector is underperforming in part because women, who are often crucial resource in agriculture and rural economy, face constraints that reduce their productivity. An understanding of these constraints is a prerequisite to devising policies to improve agricultural production and produ...

Complete row and column symmetry breaking in constraint models using the lex leader method is generally prohibitively costly. Double lex, which is derived from lex leader, is commonly used in practice as an incomplete symmetrybreaking method for row and column symmetries. Double lex is based on a rowwise canonical variable ordering. However, this choice is arbitrary. We investigate other canoni...

We consider the possibility that a light, sterile-neutrino species νS can be produced by νe scattering during the cooling of a proto-neutron star. If we parameterize the sterile-neutrino production cross section by a parameter A as σ(νeX −→ νSX) = Aσ(νeX −→ νeX), where X is an electron, neutron, or proton, we show that A is constrained by limits to the conversion of νe to νS in the region betwe...

Despite the approximations it supposes, performing LPC-based acoustico-articulatory inversion is justified in some applicative frameworks. By illustrating this assertion through experiments aiming at incorporating speech production constraints from the DRM model and from a factor-based model into an LPC modeling scheme, we promote the use of LPC-based inversion as an interface between Productio...

In this paper, we aim to take a step toward a tighter integration of automated planning and Bayesian Optimization (BO). BO is an approach for optimizing costlyto-evaluate functions by selecting a limited number of experiments that each evaluate the function at a specified input. Typical BO formulations assume that experiments are selected one at a time, or in fixed batches, and that experiments...

The use of Information Systems (IS) in manufacturing plants for monitoring, control, diagnostics, etc. has increased considerably in the recent past. The primary drivers are efficiency and quality increase through automation, facilitation of better business processes and improved decision making. Many problems and issues relating to the design, development, integration, evolution and maintenanc...

As organizations move from creating plans for individual production lines to entire supply chains it is increasingly important to recognize that planning decisions impact the quality of parts and products and, consequently, the production output. The consideration of product characteristics, e.g., fixed or uncertain lifetimes, is vital to production systems dealing with products that deteriorat...

The production of eggs can make a major nutritional demand on a female bird. The scale of the required investment varies between species, depending on the size of each egg and the number of eggs laid. For large species, where egg weight is a small proportion of female body mass, the investment in the egg is small, but in some passerines the female will lay a clutch that weighs more than her own...

This paper explores the hierarchical production planning (HPP) problem of flexible automated workshops (FAWs), each of which has a number of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). The objective is to decompose medium-term production plans (assigned to an FAW by ERP/MRP II) into short-term production plans (to be executed by FMSs in the FAW) so as to minimize cost on the condition that demands h...