Scheduling can be formalized as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). Within this framework activities in a plan are interconnected via temporal relation constraints a la Allen, thereby defining a temporal constraint graph (TCG). Additionally there are capacity constraints restricting the use of each resource to only one activity at a time. Together these constraints form a temporallcapacity...

A problem most organizations face is how to retain skilled employees. As technology has gone from common to prevalent over the past twenty years, retaining skilled information technology (IT) professionals has become more difficult. Therefore, this study focused on examining job satisfaction of IT professionals in the D.C. area, paying particular attention to two of the most important factors o...

INTRODUCTION The Libyan National Health System (LNHS) is debated for the paradox of its performance versus impact. It has poor performance, but the national health statistics are good and competitive. There are concerted efforts to manage health care services and to regain the lost trust. A primary health care (PHC) system that focuses on preventive and promotive care is the core focus of LNHS ...

In this paper we discuss how metaphors for supporting user interaction with multimedia databases can be automatically generated. The work presented is a further step in the development of Virgilio, a Virtual Reality (VR) based system that has been designed to be a general purpose exploration tool for highly structured data. Virgilio visualizes the results of a query to a database by generating ...

This paper describes a multimodal transportation network (MTN) in which several unimodal networks (AGVs, hoists, lifts, suspended monorail systems, etc.) interact each other via common shared workstations as to provide a variety of demand-responsive workpiece transportation/handling services. The set of transport modes provides connection support for production flows treated as agents trying to...

In his work presented at the Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2003), Marco Cadoli proposed an approach where the process of negotiation is considered as a distributed constraint satisfaction problem, and the negotiation spaces as convex regions: i.e., all points included in the individual region corresponds to acceptable agreements. In this paper, we evaluate an extension that we...

Symmetry-breaking in constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) is a well-established area of AI research which has recently developed strong interactions with symbolic computation, in the form of computational group theory. GE-trees are a new conceptual abstraction, providing low-degree polynomial time methods for breaking value symmetries in CSPs. In this paper we analyse the structure of symmet...

Social interaction among employees is crucial at both an organizational and individual level. Demonstrating the value of recent methodological advances, 2 studies conducted in 2 workplaces and 2 countries sought to answer the following questions: (a) Do coworkers interact more with coworkers who have similar well-being? and, if yes, (b) what are the processes by which such affiliation occurs? A...