Suboptimal or erroneous configuration data in rail automation systems may cause serious safety and cost issues. This research work aims to address continuous optimization of such data by (i) connecting configuration and operation data by integration of heterogeneous data sources, and by (ii) application of prescriptive analytics methods to propose decision options on how to correct and optimize...

Customary organizational negotiations tend to focus efforts to attaining optimality in single-problem contexts that are both disparate and temporary in nature. Once the negotiations are settled, the process usually attains closure and the long-term impact of the outcome is rarely considered. In reality, however, decisions involving quid pro quos are made on a continuous basis. Since organizatio...

Legacy systems are usually critical to the business in which they operate, but the costs of running them are often not justifiable. Determining whether such systems are worth keeping requires an overall assessment of the system. We present an assessment method that examines a legacy system from its technical, business and organisational perspectives. The method guides users through assessment o...

The author proposes and investigates different strategies for testing descriptive and prescriptive conditionals in Wason’s selection tasks. Two experiments examined the influence of frequency information on the postulated Bayesian and deontic test strategies. The rules in both the descriptive and the prescriptive case were social rules. The results of Experiment 1 showed only some of the predic...

SUMMARY In this paper, we propose a qualitative, inductive method for characterizing and evaluating software maintenance processes, thereby identifying their specific problems and needs. This method encompasses a set of procedures which attempt to determine causal links between maintenance problems and flaws in the maintenance organization and process. This allows for a set of concrete steps to...

SUMMARY In this paper, we propose a qualitative, inductive method for characterizing and evaluating software maintenance processes, thereby identifying their specific problems and needs. This method encompasses a set of procedures which attempt to determine causal links between maintenance problems and flaws in the maintenance organization and process. This allows for a set of concrete steps to...

We report new results on the corner classification approach to training feedforward neural networks. It is shown that a prescriptive learning procedure where the weights are simply read off based on the training data can provide good generalization. The paper also deals with the relations between the number of separable regions and the size of the training set for a binary data network. Prescri...

Academic training leading to prescriptive authority is compared among psychiatric nurse practitioners, physicians, and pharmacologically trained psychologists. Statistics are presented on the relative emphasis that programs serving each discipline place on the preparation of their respective students in academic and clinical content areas that are relevant to the prescribing of psychoactive med...

Today’s hearing aids are frequently fitted using prescriptive formulae. Wearer satisfaction is assumed when the frequency-gain response of the hearing aid matches the target frequency-gain response prescribed by a specific formula. Although this approach simplifies hearing aid fitting, there are several reasons to suspect that this approach may have some shortcomings in ensuring an optimal fit ...