In two studies in daycare centers, we investigated a newly developed index for flexible child care describing parents’ use of evening care and flexible attendance scheduling for their child. We examined the relation between this index together with stability in care, mother’s stress and the child’s temperament on the one hand, and quality of caregivers’ behavior and a child’s socio-emotional fu...

This paper describes a structuring mechanism for grouping objects in a distributed object-oriented language. A group structuring mechanism provides a single flexible method for managing distributed applications that involve complicated communication protocols and sophisticated structure. We have added such a mechanism to the Emerald distributed object-oriented language and its runtime system. O...

Index structures for multiple sets can be classified into those that group entries according to their key values and those that group entries according to their set membership. The former are particularly suited for exact match queries on all indexed sets, the latter especially support range queries on a small number of all indexed sets. The goal is to thoroughly evaluate the performance of bot...

Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) is a stochastic population-based metaheuristic designed for solving continuous optimization problems. It has a flexible and well-balanced mechanism for enhancing exploration and exploitation abilities. In this paper, we adapt the structure of GSA for solving the data clustering problems, the process of grouping data into clusters such that the data in each c...

Generating vehicle trajectories from video data is an important application of ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems). We introduce a new tracking approach which uses model-based 3-D vehicle detection and description algorithm. Our vehicle detection and description algorithm is based on a probabilistic line feature grouping, and it is faster (by up to an order of magnitude) and more flexible ...

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is an integrated system of computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine tools, each having an automatic tool interchange capability, and all connected by an automated material handling system. One or more computers control most real-time functions. Flexible manufacturing is realized to be an efficient alternative to conventional manufacturing that allows s...

In this paper, we consider the problem of effectively programming groups of agents. These groups should capture structuring mechanisms common in multi-agent systems, such as teams, cooperative groups, and organisations. Not only should individual agents be dynamic and evolving, but the groups in which the agents occur must be open, flexible and capable of similar evolution and restructuring. We...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently been recognized as a worthwhile tool for supporting manufacturing operations. This paper reviews AI-related approaches to Group Technology (GT) and presents the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) network, a special type of neural networks, as an intelligent tool for grouping parts and machines. SOM can learn from complex, multi-dimensional data and transform the...

The availability of techniques for comparing descriptions has many applications in Artificial Intelligence, ranging from description selection to flexible matching, from instance-based learning to clustering. Due to the complexity of handling First-Order Logic formulæ, where the presence of relations causes various portions of one description to be possibly mapped in different ways onto another...