The Brazilian Power Sector, Latin America's largest, unique among energy suppliers to the world's leading economies, is almost completely dependent on one resource for its energy supply: water. Of its 65, 134 MW of installed generating capacity, in 1998 more than 90% was hydro. A substantial amount of that hydro capacity is located on only a few rivers. The sites for the generating facilities, ...

In a robust parameter design (RPD) problem, the experimenter is interested to determine the values of con-trol factors such that responses will be robust or insensitive to variability of the noise factors. Response sur-face methodology (RSM) is one of the effective methods that can be employed for this purpose. Since quality of products or processes is usually evaluated through several quality ...

For destructive beam intensity measurements, electrostatic Faraday cups will be incorporated into the Ultra-low energy Storage Ring (USR) and its transfer lines at the Facility for Low-energy Antiproton and Ion Research (FLAIR). This multi-purpose machine will offer both slow and fast extracted beams resulting in a wide range of intensities and varying time structure of the beam. In this contri...

Abstract. In this paper we study the following generalization of the job-shop scheduling problem. Each operation can be performed by one machine out of a set of machines given for this operation. The processing time does not depend on the machine which has been chosen for processing the operation. This problem arises in the area of flexible manufacturing. As a generalization of the jobshop prob...

Highly complex learning communities where diverse participants collaborate to achieve multiple aims through synergy have the potential to be highly creative and productive. However the diversity and multiple aims can also mean the advantages of a community share understand, trust and direction are difficult to achieve, resulting in few if any of the aims being realised. We review two case studi...

This position paper argues that more research is needed into identifying key abstractions and reference criteria for multi-purpose display systems. This would enable research in this area to go beyond the development of specific applications and move towards enabling infrastructures that could serve the needs of multiple applications.

A multi-purpose symbolic system which can describe all of the mouth shapes conveying various kinds of linguistic information in signing, speech dialogue, and speechreading is developed, taking account of the constraints of anatomical structure and neural control and the possibility of visual discrimination. In order to make the changes in the three-dimensional shape of lips, the changes are des...