This chapter presents first of all a brief historical overview with critical reflections of Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) in the ‘mainstream disability world’. It also discusses, more specifically, the area of rehabilitation of people (with disabilities) affected by leprosy. Finally, the chapter provides a contemporary critical analysis of CBR and directions for the future. One should ho...

The market interest in developing reliable and stable products at shorter development time and reduced cost, has led to an increasing surge of interest in Component-Based Software Engineering. The success of these systems largely depends on the effective selection of components that meet users requirements. In this context, the products evaluation needs to be a simultaneous process with the req...

Estimation by analogy EBA (effort estimation by analogy) is one of the proven methods for effort prediction in software engineering; in AI this would be called Case-Based Reasoning. In this paper we consider effort predictions using the EBA () method AQUA and pay attention to two aspects: (i) The influence of the set of analogs on the quality of prediction. The set of analogs is determined by a...

This paper defines a generic class of monitoring extensions to component-based distributed enterprise software. Introducing a monitoring extension to a legacy application system can be very cost-ineffective. In this paper, we identify the minimum support for application monitoring within the generic components of a distributed system, necessary for rapid development of new monitoring extensions...

A common method of recovering a delayed construction programme is by schedule compression through activity crashing. To be of practical benefit, however, the cost-effectiveness of crashing any of the remaining construction activities needs be examined before a decision is reached. Although the likely cost and productivity effects of crashing can be calculated using standard estimating technique...

An Energy management system (EMS) is a concept that spans various possible solutions, ranging from basic implementations over solutions that use simple intelligent computer methods to systems that employ advanced intelligent methods. We designed and implemented an intelligent multi-agent based approach that uses a market mechanism to manage power in the microgrid of a simulated Research and Edu...

This paper analyzes a multi-task agency framework where the agent exhibits task-specific abilities. It illustrates how incentive contracts account for the agent’s task-specific abilities if contractible performance measures do not reflect the agent’s multidimensional contribution to firm value. This paper further sheds light on potential ranking criteria for performance measures in multi-task p...

This study extends the agent-based 8-Zone ISO-NE Test System to include wind turbine agents, each characterized by location, physical type, and an output curve mapping local wind speed into wind power output. Increases in wind power penetration (WPP) are modeled as build-outs of investment queues for planned wind turbine installations. The extended system is used to study the effects of increas...

BACKGROUND Attention for Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) is growing, but evidence for orphan drugs is argued to be limited and inferior. This study systematically reviews the available evidence on clinical effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and budget impact for orphan drugs. METHODS A systematic review was performed in PubMed, Embase, NHS EED and HTA databases for 11 inpatient orphan drugs list...

A lot of functionality is needed when an application, such as a museum cataloguing system, is extended with semantic capabilities, for example ontological indexing functionality or multi-facet search. To avoid duplicate work and to enable easy and cost-efficient integration of information systems with the Semantic Web, we propose a web widget approach. Here, data sources are combined with funct...