This article presents a design approach for control and supervision systems of industrial processes based on intelligent agents. First, the general platform supporting the whole multi-agent system for control and supervision is defined. From there, applications are conceived like specialized multi-agent systems to coordinate, execute and evaluate control and supervision tasks needed for the dis...

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the most fundamental problems in combinatorial optimization. Given a graph, the goal is to find a Hamiltonian cycle of minimum or maximum weight. We consider finding Hamiltonian cycles of maximum weight (Max-TSP). An instance of Max-TSP is a complete graph G = (V,E) with edge weights w : E → N. The goal is to find a Hamiltonian cycle of maximum wei...

Dimensional analysis, for multi-criteria decision making, is a mathematical method that includes diverse heterogeneous criteria into a single dimensionless index. Dimensional Analysis, in its current definition, presents the drawback to manipulate fuzzy information commonly presented in a multi-criteria decision making problem. To overcome such limitation, we propose two dimensional analysis ba...

In 2006, Florida's Medicaid reform required some Medicaid consumers to enroll in health plans that differed in terms of cost-sharing requirements and benefit limitations. In focus groups we found enthusiasm among Medicaid consumers for having choices among health plans; however, enthusiasm did not translate into comparison shopping for health plans. Survey findings suggested that Medicaid consu...

Designing the way a complex system should evolve to better match the customers’ requirements provides an interesting class of applications for muticriteria techniques. The required models to support the improvement design of a complex system must include both preference models and system behavioral models. A MAUT model captures the decisions related to customers’ preferences whereas a fuzzy rep...

When forming coalitions, agents have different utilities per coalition. Game-theoretic approaches typically assume that the scalar utility for each agent for each coalition is public information. However, we argue that this is not a realistic assumption, as agents may not want to divulge this information or are even incapable of expressing it. To mitigate this, we propose the multi-criteria coa...

The evaluation and selection of recommender systems is a difficult decision making process. This difficulty is partially due to the large diversity of published evaluation criteria in addition to lack of standardized methods of evaluation. As such, a systematic methodology is needed that explicitly considers multiple, possibly conflicting metrics and assists decision makers to evaluate and find...

Technology assessment and selection has a substantial impact on organizations procedures in regards to technology transfer. Technological decisions are usually made by a group of experts, and whereby integrity of these viewpoints to a single decision can be quite complex. Today, operational databases and data warehouses exist to manage and organize data with specific features and henceforth, th...